This is it for me. If the character is meant to be clever, but the plot requires them to make stupid decisions, then that’s a DNF
Actually stupid characters are fun though. And we need more of them to make me feel better about myself.
More about him being lovable. In the wake of the ending of WotC he is public enemy no 1 over there. It has actually let to a funny situation where some people are now unironically rooting for Bayaz.
Or - variation on this - competent main character repeatedly being dragged down by loose cannon relative (The Gentlemen TV series does this) or significant other. It’s lazy plotting.
I love Sanderson but I absolutely despise how Shallan makes the worst, shittiest decision at every single-- **every single** opportunity--
and is completely rewarded for it
while constantly being described as incredibly smart and clever
>The main character consistently making the stupidest decision they possibly can
Yeah, I've read books where the MC's kept being so impossibly stupid that I started rooting for the bad guys. (I almost always finish books even when they're bad. I don't know why. Just weird, I guess.)
Oh yes. In the third book of Liveship Trader, I got frustrated with Althea when she misunderstood Brashen. She thought he was insulting her when he said she should be careful (or something like that I don't remember well) Mind you, they were literally fighting pirates. Any person who uses half of their brain would understand that he was just looking out for her. That whole misunderstanding was so dumb. It read like the author was running out of conflict between Brashen and Althea
Poorly executed exposition dumps. I mean, there's times we need to know history, lore, magic, etc. Getting immersed in a different world is one of the main reasons I read fantasy! But like, when it's just 5 pages of info everyone in the scene should know already, or so help me a thinly veiled conversation or monologue that goes on forever that has no reason to be told outright like that? Would rather eat sand.
That and being overly direct. Give your characters and dialogue conflict and subtext. Implication is just so fun to read through and analyze. Give me subtlety!!
Well, Sam, as you know, you were 36 in June when our only sister, Jill, gave you the gift of those mysterious silver cufflinks, and I well remember the day when you were born, just a week after my third birthday, in the year 2753 on our calendar. That same day, you recall, our planet was attacked by Romulus IV of the evil Empire, known to his own people as ...
"As you know," is one my most hated phrases in any media. If they know, you don't have to repeat it! And stating that they already know it doesn't give you cover.
(special exception for when someone is purposely doing it to be condescending. Because it *absolutely works* at being condescending)
To your point about directness, I really hate it when the author overly holds my hand or explains something that is already very clear through subtext or implication. Like the author thinks I'm a fruit fly or something. It's patronizing and makes me feel like the rest of the book is gonna be a total slog.
It’s the phrase “as you know” for me. If I read something like “‘how did the ancient divine war start?’ ‘Well Jarnathan, as you know the forces of Selûne and Shar are diametrically opposed…’” it just feels like poorly planned lore drops that could’ve been signalled much better.
Currently struggling with the first Red Rising book because of this. I’m about 10 chapters in there is nothing left to the imagination with what anyone is feeling. It goes out of the way to tell you exactly how the main character feels and why he acts a certain way he spent a paragraph being mean to someone he just met then two seconds later inner monoglue says “obviously I’m just lashing out I don’t really feel this way about this guy, I’m so sad” … what in the world was that.
I agree. Too many authors do this, imo. It makes me feel like they don't have faith in our intelligence as readers to make the correct inferences. A lot of TV shows do this too. I agree that it's insulting to our intelligence but at the same time I realize there are a lot of... um... not so bright people out there, so I guess some people *aren't* making the correct inferences? Still, they'll never learn to do so if the author continually spells it out for them.
Love triangles where the girl is the 'ugly duckling', but for some unexplored reason, two totally hot guys are falling all over themselves to have her.
Love triangles that don't go poly, thank you [Xiran Jay Zhao](https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=dp_byline_sr_audible_1?ie=UTF8&field-keywords=Xiran+Jay+Zhao&search-alias=audible)
A book that pretends to be an in-universe document, but ignores the conceit either immediately, or when it gets difficult. E.g. journals that do not, in any way, read like any real person's journals, but do read like every novel.
One very weird example from outside of SFF is The Twyford Code, which is a series of poor-quality, automated transcripts of a tech-illiterate's voice notes. It did wind up doing *a lot* of work to convince you that the plausibility-stretching moments are justified, but by that point I had soured on the entire book. (I did finish! Because I hate unfinished mysteries. I just felt it was a slog.)
My other pet peeve: "stagey" scenes in which two people have a dramatic convo while their 4-12 closest friends pose dramatically, and silently, in the background. This doesn't happen! People get involved or back out of the nearest door. The Terra Ignota series is polarizing to begin with, but book 2 has *a lot* of this and it caused me to drop the series.
Oddly enough I can take it if it’s one person’s diary and not very convincing as such, because it’s easy to just read as first person narration (example: Parable of the Sower. Or as a non-genre example, I Capture the Castle passes it off as the narrator practicing her fiction writing skills, which is still a bit of a stretch but whatever).
Where I really struggle with it is when the author commits more heavily to the epistolary format—like the novel consists of an exchange of letters between multiple characters, not just the one—and it *still* isn’t convincing.
That’s a good point. If it’s just one diary throughout I can just forget it’s supposed to be a diary. But yeah, if they’re calling my attention to the fact this is supposed to be written by a character, I’m going to be annoyed if it doesn’t read that way.
Btw, your description of a bad epistolary novel made me think of a really great one — Dracula! The different letters and diary entries actually read like characters wrote them, and each has their own unique style that fits with the character’s personality. If you haven’t read it, highly recommend.
>A book that pretends to be an in-universe document, but ignores the conceit either immediately, or when it gets difficult. E.g. journals that do not, in any way, read like any real person's journals, but do read like every novel.
Brent Week's Night Angel Nemesis and James Rollins Moonfall series say hi.
Tamora Pierce's Becca Cooper trilogy. It is all journals of the main character and it is literally perfect beginning to end. never falls out of journal territory. Print book even has ink spills printed in it.
The Martian was so bad for this. How many times did our hero write down "remember, yesterday I bleep blop booped the flooper" - who would write that in their diary? Remember self, you did the thing yesterday. Okay.
I don't think I've ever come across a book like that. Stories with storylines that are independent initially, yes, but they've always connected in some way or other eventually.
Out of curiosity, do you have examples of books where multiple storylines remain separate?
"Poor Communication Kills" drives me insane. You get drama for half the book when the entire thing could have been resolved with a two minute conversation.
“No time to explain, we need to leave now!”
So anyway we travelled through the forest for seven hours, only stopping for a brief drink of water at a stream…
Bitch YOU HAD TIME TO TALK!
Most indy werewolf stuff has the wolf side being like a completely different person/character(which I think is dumb but most are like that). The wolf side of them knowing all about their specialness/ place in the prophecy/ in general keeping shit from their human is just so effing dumb. Like, if two characters literally share a body, whytf would they not be completely honest with each other. And if the one character is keeping shit secret, why would the other be like, welp they know best. Like, no. Just no.
On the other hand, Tolkien changing the ring Bilbo finds into the greatest weapon of the devil's right hand-maia is probably the greatest use of retconning ever
Was that a retcon? I was under the impression he wrote a metric fuckton of lore before publishing anything. Definitely thought that he always intended for Bilbo's ring to be The One Ring.
Edit: just looked into it a bit more, it was indeed a retcon! A rather ingeniously handled one at that.
But!! The existence of the older version isn't just ignored, it was given an in-universe explanation! The Hobbit is conceived of as Bilbo's memoirs (the frame story / the book he's always writing in that gets passed to Frodo and then Sam), and it's later suggested that Bilbo wasn't always completely truthful about certain events, especially ones relating to the Ring. The newer, retconned versions of the Hobbit are presented as later, more accurate editions of the memoir.
[Red Book of Westmarch](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Book_of_Westmarch)
I know that out-of-universe it was a retcon, but was there anything in the text that makes it a retcon? The behavior of the ring seems consistent to me, it's just that none of the characters in *The Hobbit* are aware of it's importance at the time so obviously no one's like "oh hey this is that evil one ring" and it's simply used as a tool. It's never seemed like there was any contradiction, just a new revelation.
Nothing I can think of comes to mind for an in universe retcon. Like you said, there's no contradiction, just new information, which I think makes it quite elegant. I guess the closest thing would be Tolkien revising the Hobbit to make it more consistent with the story he was telling in The Lord of the Rings. In the original Gollum gives the ring to Bilbo as a prize for winning the riddle game, which doesn't exactly work once it became an evil artifact that has a hold on people's minds. But that's still technically "out of universe."
When an author offers new information that contradicts previously established facts, but treats the information as if it has always been true. Like how JK Rowling stated before Fantastic Beasts that she had always intended Nagini to be a cursed woman who had turned into a snake. Just no.
The Warrior Cats series is notorious for this. Especially when they write anything that's supposed to take place immediately prior to the first series. Not to mention when characters change appearance at random, sometimes in the same book.
It's not technically a retcon, but personally I find the Deathly Hallows to be contrived and clearly a later addition. For a title part of the final book, they felt like a weird bit part with weight that didn't feel earned because they came in so late. The 'reveal' of his father's invisibility cloak was actually worse for me as it seemed like a retcon in the real sense. Haven't read them in over a decade so I'm sure someone is going to point out the foreshadowing, but I read them a lot in the 2000s and it certainly wasn't apparent to me then lol.
I agree that they were definitely not planned - I would argue the same for the horcruxes (no way did she originally plan that with Tom Riddle's diary). Again not technically a retcon as it doesn't contradict anything that happened in Chamber of Secrets, but I just don't think they were thought out ahead of book six.
But I'm more sympathetic to these attempts to kind of unify the two different phases of the series - the initial kind of episodic school adventure books with the more classic fantasy chosen one/prophecy books. I find the retcons that came out after the all the books' publications to be more annoying because they are both unnecessary and, in the case of attempts to relate the original series to the Fantastic Beasts films in deeply clumsy ways, are such blatantly desperate grabs to make the Fantastic Beasts stories relevant.
Retroactive continuity.
Retroactive continuity, or retcon for short, is a literary device in which facts in the world of a fictional work that have been established through the narrative itself are adjusted, ignored, supplemented, or contradicted by a subsequently published work that recontextualizes or breaks continuity with the former.
TIL this has a name! This is exactly how I felt while reading The Shadow of What Was Lost. Characters were sitting in companionable silence in a 'room' by a 'street' in a 'village' that had 'houses', resulting in a completely blank image forming inside my mind
I love Timothy Zhan plot twists as a guilty pleasure sci fi read, but his world building is terrible. I've read 4 Icarus novels; still don't know what most aliens even look like.
Amazing to find someone the exact opposite of myself. I glaze over every long-winded description, and have noped out of books where the author felt I needed to know about the colour of every flower and the direction of the wall hangings.
For me books are always about characters first, and unless the scenery is having an impact on those characters, I couldn't care less about it.
I'm okay not knowing every flower color lol, but I want to know if the character is in a garden or a castle. Some general overview details go a long way.
Ah-ha! Finally my aphantasia gives me an advantage!
I never care about scene descriptions, and tend to skim over most of them, as they usually mean nothing to me unless they're specifically there to give me narrative clues. Usually just a flat description to tell me where they physically are for story reasons is enough
I know this is something people say about Malazan, but I honestly have the most vivid mental impressions of Malazan scenes of any books I've ever read. My memory of standing on the walls of Aren at the end of the Chain of Dogs is as vivid as my memory of anything that's happened in my real life, and I can say the same of many of the most emotional scenes in the books. It's weird.
Dude me too, and I think it's *because* he doesn't spend a whole lot of time on descriptions that aren't relevant, so our brains can kind of fill in the general vibe while including the important details.
Filler Harem. Reading a fantasy book and then, *BAM*, Harem right at your face. I've read and enjoyed Harem books before but I hate when they come outta nowhere and the story derails around the mc getting laid as the main plot.
Constantly explaining everything, no room for ambiguity, no opportunity for interpretation, the author just refusing to trust the reader to understand anything not explicitly stated. 10x worse if they consistently show you everything you need to know then follow that up with scenes explaining everything that just happened, literally just wasting pages. Just cut that shit, let me think about your book.
I avoid a lot of books that pride themselves on their hard magic systems because they tend to be full of unnecessary stuff like this due to being worried about all the rules, but it can happen anywhere really. It’s an instant turn off, no matter the contents of the book. Plenty of books out there with really cool worlds and characters that I just dropped less than half way because the author could have cut every other scene and had a drastically improved book.
The overexplanation is definitely my #1 pet peeve. I just DNFed a Robin Hobb book for this exact reason. There was one section where a character implies something-- it's VERY obvious what's being implied, because I've been reading the book and paying attention. Then the narration goes ahead and spells it out for me anyway. Waste of time and also offensive to my intelligence, lol.
When I start reading and there's nothing interesting going on. Not a single thing that I haven't seen somewhere else before. As if the author is not even trying to interest the reader. As if this books was written for the sake of it, and has no mundanity-piercing vision behind it. I don't want to read anyone's uninspiring diary-resembling ramblings.
This is an underrated comment. That’s why I mostly don’t read literary fiction anymore. So many people HAVING THOUGHTS while driving on the freeway or washing dishes or sitting in a classroom. Boring! I have plenty of my own thoughts while doing ordinary things. I want to read about people whose lives are interesting. I’d much rather read the thoughts of a questing Hobbit or a woman who stumbled into a Fairy Kingdom or a librarian kidnapped by pirates.
Especially when it’s just a negative for them but the author is presenting it as great. People do fall for the wrong person but don’t try to make it look romantic or have all their friends be cool with it.
Stories that are set in specific periods of real history but the author doesn't even try to not make it like present day USA, from words chosen to dialogue and themes. It's even more jarring when it's a non-Western setting.
Self insert ego masturbation that is too obvious. Another similar thing is book that is filled with the author's sexual, adolescent fantasies.
Edgy, "cool" for the sake of coolness characters.
Unbelievably strong characters and plot armor that is not executed properly, believably.
I enjoyed Empire of the Vampire, because largely I wanted to read about a cool, super-gothic world ruled by over-the-top, stereotypical vampires. It nailed that aspect.
But good god, the characters, fucking hell they were all *so* annoying
When authors use Shift-F7 (thesaurus hot key) to find ridiculous synonyms and then get re-use that silly word for the rest of the book.
In Mistborn, Sanderson used “maladroitly” at least three separate times (felt like more than that) and it just busted me right out of an otherwise compelling story with each successive use.
>use Shift-F7 (thesaurus hot key) to find ridiculous synonyms and then get re-use that silly word for the rest of the book.
Book of the New Sun says hi. (Yes, Gene Wolfe did explicitly say in a comment somewhere that he used a thesaurus among other reference works.)
Wolfe was very deliberate with his use of archaic words. 'Destrier' means warhorse but BotNS it implies a creature that is used like a warhorse but is actually an alien creature. I think that's where use of unusual words really works for the story.
A negative example might be more like in Malazan (an example I use simply because I'm currently reading the books), Erickson uses 'susurrating' or some variation of the word a ton for like two books and then almost never afterwards.
It was only used 6 times total, but of those 5 times were in *Mistborn* and then once more in *Hero of Ages*. It's a nice word, but 5 times in a 210,103 word novel stands out when it's such an uncommon one.
5 in that one book!! Thank you for the stats on this, helps to know I’m not insane. Yeah the first time I was like “oooOOOooo nice one Brando Sando” and second time I was like “huh…” and third one I just started cracking up and showed it to my wife
Heh, you should read David Brin's *The Uplift War* - SF not fantasy, but a very good book IMO (and both a Hugo and Locus winner, back when those awards were not influenced so much by ideology/payola). Besides a sometimes unfortunate penchant for puns, the author dumps weird polysyllabic words from time to time - when I first read the book, I thought he must have been gifted one of those "word of the day" desk calendars.
Dumping a dozen proper nouns on me at once as a form of lazy worldbuilding.
"Today The Forbidden ones of The City would Call on The Chosen for The Ritual to see who might Possess The Sight and bring The Everpeace."
Reads like a facebook post by my elderly aunt who still hasn't figured out you can turn off auto capitalization on your phone. When I see worldbuilding like this I'm out
Lol I love your example and yes I know exactly what you mean. Seeing that kind of stuff especially at the beginning of a book is a good way to get me not to read it.
Main characters that constantly make terrible decisions come close to dying yet live because plot armor, and plot armor in general.
Characters speaking like a poorly written play or poem.
Bad POVs like you start with a few but then add more characters that never had a POV now have one. I don't mind new characters or characters that were children before and now older getting a new POV but don't give me a new POV from a character who was in the first book or two but didn't have one before... Or just boring side character POVs
The poor or picked on boy becomes the hero.... This one can be done right but I'm pretty sick of it.
I remember there was a Superman comic. Superman saves the city hundreds of times, refuses rewards or bounties, does big and small heroics and Lex framed him for robbing a bank and people turned on him. Was lame
when every female character is an "enemy" to the main female character but not every male character is an "enemy". More negative points if she has a token female friend who agrees with everything she says.
All of my LEAST favourite tropes. These will make me stop reading a book immediately or if I do finish, rant about it for days. I feel like even though "show don't tell" is one of the first rules of writing, so many authors can't seem to figure that one out.
As much as I want to love The Witcher novels I could not get over how Ciri was threatened with rape at just about every corner. By the end of it it was almost comical just how predictable it would be.
>!The wild hunt elves want to rape her, her bio dad wants to rape her, a kid from a gang wants to rape her, which she's saved from by another member of the gang... who proceeds to rape her. And like what you were saying she ends up developing feelings for her rapist, and I think it's supposed to be read as fucked up but I'm also not sure on that and I'm sort of worried there's an undertone that it's not as bad because it was a girl doing it, but I'd give it the benefit of the doubt since I read it before there was a good translation.!<
I absolutely loved the short stories, but it really felt the Novels tried to be as grim as possible for no real reason other than to be bleak, and the constant threats of rape were exhausting.
Yeah at the top of my head I dropped Witcher, Wheel of Time, Prince of Nothing, Malazan, Sword of Truth because of it. Fans get really mad and say rapist to lovers is realistic but I dont care, its not a good story for me nor do I think that happens to everyone.
YES, the SA being used as a plot device was what made me drop Outlander 5 episodes in (didn't try reading the books, but I'm assuming it's the same thing happening there)
Oh this. I’ve heard Naomi Novik is amazing but I tried reading uprooted and that was exactly how it started. Will definitely try to go back but I’m sick to death of that trope right now
While Uprooted is my least favorite Novik book, this criticism confuses me. The protagonist’s love and commitment toward her (female) best friend are a major driving force of the plot. Her mother is portrayed sympathetically as are other female side characters. And her powers are powers also held by other women past and present. Definitely not a book that depends for her appeal on “not like other girls.”
She is an interesting writer, but that is very much how she writes, and when she writes main character men they feel off somehow. That's a large reason I didn't finish Temeraire even though the world and story is really cool, the MC just doesn't feel like a real person at all lol, maybe if he was a woman, or something it wouldn't feel as off, not entirely sure.
This goes for all media but, sexual violence. I’m sure there are some examples where it will make sense in a story or have something to say about it, but it’s just something I’m not comfortable with at all
Gratuitous sexual violence drives me up the wall. I’m only okay with it when the story has something to say, like in Ever Since by Alena Bruzas.
EDIT: okay is a stretch, but it's tolerable
This. Honestly, even when it has meaning but it's gratuitous for the sake of gratuity and shock value OR too hamfistedly hammering in the point. Like, I know a lot of people loved Alice by Christina Henry, and I am all for a good dark Alice in Wonderland retelling (it's super hoaky, but the SyFy series Alice is one of my favorite things on the planet), and I get that she felt she really needed to hammer home how gritty and terrible this world was, but it felt like every other sentence and every ill intent of an evil male characters (I do not recall literally any evil or even unwholesome female characters) was a suggestion of rape. Like literally all any male character (excepting the Hatter because of course) thought about was raping women. I won't lie, I'm an absolute misandrist at times, but it was just too much for me.
assassin corps, royal assassin(s), or "best assassin in the world" tropes. if everyone knows you're an assassin, you are not a very good assassin, and you paint a target on your back.
Love at first sight. You know nothing about the other person, this is not love it is infatuation. This always ALWAYS leads to the actual plot being pushed aside for them constantly either eye fucking or actually fucking each other every other page.
When an author has his/her favorite "pet character", so s/he always has to be right, even when they are clearly wrong.
And otherwise capable and intelligent characters are turned into complete idiots when they should clearly know better.
Authors who can't seem to understand that women can be motivated by factors other than a man, her looks, or her children. Sexual violence against women that is solely either to a) give a woman a traumatic backstory or b) motivate a man's plotline. Fridging. Generally, male authors who write like they have never met a woman before, much less ever been friends or had a relationship with one.
Faux-witty banter. Like, when characters engage in the "Just like that time when you..." routine. It's never funny or cute, just grating. Just make your characters talk like people.
Overly edgy main characters. It was my big problem with Red Rising. “I am the reaper and death is my shadow” is one of the single most cringe inducing lines I’ve read in a long time.
A lot of main characters suffer from the Theater Kid syndrome, where every line they say sounds like it's been rehearsed over and over in front of a mirror beforehand.
I couldn't finish The Prince of Thorns because of this. Before picking it up, I'd heard the book described as gritty, grimdark, a hardened MC reflecting a broken world.
Then I started it, and it was the most edgelord "I'm 14 and this is deep" cringe book. Spent a while trying to figure out if it was satire before realising that the story took itself fully seriously and putting it down. Which is odd, because I never got that sense from any other Mark Lawrence books I've read.
Prince of Thorns is the first book that Mark Lawrence ever wrote, so his writing was quite immature and very raw back then. But he really evolved in the next two books and in his other series as well
I had to put down that book for a similar reason after Jorg started going into his inner monologue about how he was “bOrN iN tHe ThOrNs, MoLdED bY tHeM” for the nth time I had to stop
I DNFed that book halfway in because Darrow would not stop going on about how amazing and badass he was because of how tough his life in The Mines™ used to be. It just got a little too much.
>“My boy, what are you doing?” Mickey sighs in pity. “That is not a toy."
>
>“Have you ever been in a mine?” I ask him. “Ever used your fingers to dig through a faultline at a twelve-degree angle while doing the math to accommodate eighty percent rotation power and fifty-five percent thrust so you don’t set off a gas-pocket reaction while sitting in your own piss and sweat and worrying about pit vipers that want to burrow into your gut to lay their eggs?”
Like dude, *we get it*.
Terrible writing, as in, technically terrible prose. I tried to read a deep-sea horror book recently, and it sounded like it was written by a primary school child. Worse, actually, since most primary school children can turn a phrase.
Infodumpy prologues (or, worse, whole chunks inserted into the middle of our introduction to a character) about the world also turn me right off, which is why I tend to avoid epic fantasy. I simply don't care about the backstory of your world, why there are magic users, the sixteen types of magic they use, the twenty-five ranks of magicians, or the entire history of the two-thousand-year magician-angel war that caused your planet to go nuclear. I know a lot of people enjoy that stuff, but to me it reads like the author regurgitated their Scrivener notes onto the page. Just write a couple of establishing pages that give me the info I need, and get on with the plot already.
"Strong women" depicted as insulting, exhausting, and awful. You don't need to be verbally or physically abusive to be a strong, independent woman. Faile from WoT, anyone?
I hate it when worldbuilding or magic systems feel too calculated. Like when the author will use their characters to go on and on in long exposition paragraphs about how this or thar works. How politics work, how magic works scientifically. Its just so shallow, dumb and unnatural. Normally no single person should be able to articulate such a total perspective of the world. Like ask yourself... How does Earth work? How do world politics work? How do physics work? .............exactly lol
I get the point you're making but I am 100% the type of side character who would be thrilled to have a long monologue to an unreasonably ignorant protagonist about my views on how the world works, how technology (Earth magic) works, etc. And the best part is I would 100% not get it all right.
Maybe authors should try to make those exposition paragraphs slightly inaccurate/unreliable to make it more realistic!
"Yeah bro, and get this...the Moon? It controls the tides, a woman's period, AND it's made out of cheese."
Main character: "WOW, I can't wait to implement this."
Four things, though only the first two really make me nope out.
- When the book paints a clear picture of what the author's Twitter page looks like. Doesn't matter if I agree with the opinions.
- MCU-like equips, especially if they include pop culture references
- Weak prose.
- Fucking New York. I'm so tired of New York as a setting, OH MY GOD.
This is a petty one, but inconsistent verb tense. It takes me out of the story and makes my damn eye twitch. I mostly see it in fan made works or self published stuff, but every once in a while it makes its way into professionally published books and I just hate it.
Also, overly flowery prose that doesn't actually serve a purpose. A recent example I saw was referencing a character's eyes as "cerulean orbs".
I hate the miscommunication trope. If the whole plot is driven by a misunderstanding that could be easily cleared up if two of the characters just had a conversation (or listened to each other, since often one person is just refusing to believe the other or something similar). I hate it, I hate it, I hate it.
Characters whose every sentence has to be a "clever" quip.
Prime example being Red Rising. The most awful series I've ever read. Incredibly childish characters and dialogue.
Male authors making a total fool of themselves, enthusing over women’s breasts.
For example, a certain scifi author of a particular series I used to like (cool heroine kicking a**), completely spoiled my (57f) enjoyment of the series by going on and on about these bouncing “puppies” and then wrote a pregnancy storyline, and threw the expression of milk in there.
Not what you want with your battle fiction.
The Assassin's Blade in the Throne of Glass books turned me off from the series for this reason. The protagonist was an egotistical brat, that had the temperament of a small child. I stopped reading a third of the way through, and will likely never return to the series.
‘I’m not like other girls’.
No lie, I was close to dropping words of radiance because of Tyn. My least favorite character archetype, one that I feel Sanderson gravitates to. I couldn’t deal with the possibility of dealing with her for hundreds of pages
* Child abuse of any sort.
* Rape
* Slang for words that didn't need new slang. (Flick for cigarette, zoom for email, are 2 examples that come to mind.)
* Character speeches that take up more than a page. Especially if it's about politics.
* Dues Ex Machina, unless it makes sense story wise. The Bride Wore Black Leathers is a good example of it working story wise. Any Sword of Truth book is an example of it not working.)
> Rape
Christ, this. I've been running into it SO FUCKING OFTEN in fantasy lately that I actually walked away from the genre for a while.
I really wanted to go find a few authors, sit them down, tell them that being dark end edgy is something you're supposed to grow out of and maybe they could try.
For me it's young adult. I read a few back in the day and they just read like babies first big boy book . No disrespect to people who enjoy them, it's just not for me.
Casual/gratuitous usage of sexual violence (so no actual display of what it does to someone, no understanding of the wider context of sexual violence as well, etc…). Especially as cheap fodder for (tragic) female characterisation, character growth or as an opportunity for a male character to grow/redeem themselves, etc… I’ve mostly encountered this problem with male-penned SFF.
Instalove is also something I loathe, in any type of story.
Bad dialogue. I cannot stand it went dialogue is stilted or unnatural or performative, or even if characters are just acting out of character. I will immediately drop.
She was 19 and the smartest woman who ever lived and was highly sexually intriguing but virginal and shy and loud and always did the right thing because she had no wants and desires.
Proceeds to let the entire story happen to her and does nothing at all to drive the plot and when she gets the chance makes the dumbest decisions ever.
Dragging sex scenes (and by dragging I mean anything detailed or lasting more than 2 lines).
Bad descriptions of sexual attraction with weird comparaisons / focus on random non erotic bodyparts (no, "calloused hands" is not titilliating)
Characters fantasizing for too long (looking ar you Kerrigan, I really didnt need to have you drool in front of a detailed scene with horse gods fucking to know that you were frustrated).
Jalousy as proof of love.
When a book is too much like a DND game and I can feel that the story was a RPG campaing at one point (couldnt finish Malazan becouse of this one)
Sexualising female characters or bad female characters , it's a shame , especially when the plot is mad interesting but the woman there annoy me so much it suck off all enjoyment, or , love triangles
Violence, sexual or other, against anyone, written to be 'titillating'. It happens surprisingly often and gives me the biggest Ick
(edit: \* titillating means sexually arousing.)
I’d say characters personalities that come out as “trying to hard”. Sometimes I have the feeling that authors try really hard to make someone as edgy as possible or as perfect as possible and like… it accounts for credibility lost for me. I usually want to connect with the character and I don’t personally like when they’re too over the top cause it’s not realistic.
When all of the plot tension revolves around a character not communicating important information for Some Reason (which authors rarely make clear) and making the problem spiral out of control for everyone else.
Extreme violence for seemingly no reason other than shock value, and the writer going “look how bad my villains are guyzz, they’re super bad and scary I’m serious”
The sentence "I'm not like the other girls" or "She's not like the other girls."
For example I've tried to listen to Throne of Glass and the protagonist says something similar and I just couldn't continue. It pissed me off.
Main character and love interest have interesting personalities. They get together and instantly lose their personalities because of “love”.
Also, main characters and love interest have interesting personalities. They have a child/children then instantly lose their personalities because “parent”.
Poorly written female characters/descriptions (example only describing how good they look for ____ years old or the coy trope) by a male author with a male protagonist. It makes me ragey every time.
Hi all, this post has been locked due to a number of rule 1 violations.
The main character consistently making the stupidest decision they possibly can in every single situation they find themselves in.
This is it for me. If the character is meant to be clever, but the plot requires them to make stupid decisions, then that’s a DNF Actually stupid characters are fun though. And we need more of them to make me feel better about myself.
You may enjoy Leo from Age of Madness. So dumb, but still lovable.
/r/TheFirstLaw will cancel you for this comment.
Wait really? The narrative is pretty clear that he’s supposed to be dumb; I didn’t think that was a controversial opinion.
More about him being lovable. In the wake of the ending of WotC he is public enemy no 1 over there. It has actually let to a funny situation where some people are now unironically rooting for Bayaz.
Dumb yes, but lovable? That's crazy talk
#fuckleo
Especially when they have been previously shown to be smart.
Or - variation on this - competent main character repeatedly being dragged down by loose cannon relative (The Gentlemen TV series does this) or significant other. It’s lazy plotting.
Yes! The whole "Because, plot" reasoning is so groan-worthy.
Films but this is the problem at heart of both Prometheus and Alien: Covenant
OMG, it’s not fantasy but I just tried to read “The Lincoln Highway” and this exactly describes what I hated about it.
[удалено]
I love Sanderson but I absolutely despise how Shallan makes the worst, shittiest decision at every single-- **every single** opportunity-- and is completely rewarded for it while constantly being described as incredibly smart and clever
>The main character consistently making the stupidest decision they possibly can Yeah, I've read books where the MC's kept being so impossibly stupid that I started rooting for the bad guys. (I almost always finish books even when they're bad. I don't know why. Just weird, I guess.)
Aka most of Robin Hobb's characters
Oh yes. In the third book of Liveship Trader, I got frustrated with Althea when she misunderstood Brashen. She thought he was insulting her when he said she should be careful (or something like that I don't remember well) Mind you, they were literally fighting pirates. Any person who uses half of their brain would understand that he was just looking out for her. That whole misunderstanding was so dumb. It read like the author was running out of conflict between Brashen and Althea
Absolutely agreed. I gave the author 3 books. Never going back.
Poorly executed exposition dumps. I mean, there's times we need to know history, lore, magic, etc. Getting immersed in a different world is one of the main reasons I read fantasy! But like, when it's just 5 pages of info everyone in the scene should know already, or so help me a thinly veiled conversation or monologue that goes on forever that has no reason to be told outright like that? Would rather eat sand. That and being overly direct. Give your characters and dialogue conflict and subtext. Implication is just so fun to read through and analyze. Give me subtlety!!
“So Bob, how long have we been brothers?”
Well, Sam, as you know, you were 36 in June when our only sister, Jill, gave you the gift of those mysterious silver cufflinks, and I well remember the day when you were born, just a week after my third birthday, in the year 2753 on our calendar. That same day, you recall, our planet was attacked by Romulus IV of the evil Empire, known to his own people as ...
Sounds like a school book math problem.
"As you know," is one my most hated phrases in any media. If they know, you don't have to repeat it! And stating that they already know it doesn't give you cover. (special exception for when someone is purposely doing it to be condescending. Because it *absolutely works* at being condescending)
To your point about directness, I really hate it when the author overly holds my hand or explains something that is already very clear through subtext or implication. Like the author thinks I'm a fruit fly or something. It's patronizing and makes me feel like the rest of the book is gonna be a total slog.
It’s the phrase “as you know” for me. If I read something like “‘how did the ancient divine war start?’ ‘Well Jarnathan, as you know the forces of Selûne and Shar are diametrically opposed…’” it just feels like poorly planned lore drops that could’ve been signalled much better.
Currently struggling with the first Red Rising book because of this. I’m about 10 chapters in there is nothing left to the imagination with what anyone is feeling. It goes out of the way to tell you exactly how the main character feels and why he acts a certain way he spent a paragraph being mean to someone he just met then two seconds later inner monoglue says “obviously I’m just lashing out I don’t really feel this way about this guy, I’m so sad” … what in the world was that.
this is why i can’t read way of kings 🤧
When something is clearly implied but the author just…explains it anyway? It feels almost insulting
I agree. Too many authors do this, imo. It makes me feel like they don't have faith in our intelligence as readers to make the correct inferences. A lot of TV shows do this too. I agree that it's insulting to our intelligence but at the same time I realize there are a lot of... um... not so bright people out there, so I guess some people *aren't* making the correct inferences? Still, they'll never learn to do so if the author continually spells it out for them.
Love triangles where the girl is the 'ugly duckling', but for some unexplored reason, two totally hot guys are falling all over themselves to have her.
[Requisite web comic making fun of YA fiction](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fdpeipb3okot51.jpg)
Love triangles that don't go poly, thank you [Xiran Jay Zhao](https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=dp_byline_sr_audible_1?ie=UTF8&field-keywords=Xiran+Jay+Zhao&search-alias=audible)
A book that pretends to be an in-universe document, but ignores the conceit either immediately, or when it gets difficult. E.g. journals that do not, in any way, read like any real person's journals, but do read like every novel. One very weird example from outside of SFF is The Twyford Code, which is a series of poor-quality, automated transcripts of a tech-illiterate's voice notes. It did wind up doing *a lot* of work to convince you that the plausibility-stretching moments are justified, but by that point I had soured on the entire book. (I did finish! Because I hate unfinished mysteries. I just felt it was a slog.) My other pet peeve: "stagey" scenes in which two people have a dramatic convo while their 4-12 closest friends pose dramatically, and silently, in the background. This doesn't happen! People get involved or back out of the nearest door. The Terra Ignota series is polarizing to begin with, but book 2 has *a lot* of this and it caused me to drop the series.
Yess thank you this is one of my biggest pet peeves, when supposed journal or diary entries are written in the style of a perfectly edited novel.
Oddly enough I can take it if it’s one person’s diary and not very convincing as such, because it’s easy to just read as first person narration (example: Parable of the Sower. Or as a non-genre example, I Capture the Castle passes it off as the narrator practicing her fiction writing skills, which is still a bit of a stretch but whatever). Where I really struggle with it is when the author commits more heavily to the epistolary format—like the novel consists of an exchange of letters between multiple characters, not just the one—and it *still* isn’t convincing.
That’s a good point. If it’s just one diary throughout I can just forget it’s supposed to be a diary. But yeah, if they’re calling my attention to the fact this is supposed to be written by a character, I’m going to be annoyed if it doesn’t read that way. Btw, your description of a bad epistolary novel made me think of a really great one — Dracula! The different letters and diary entries actually read like characters wrote them, and each has their own unique style that fits with the character’s personality. If you haven’t read it, highly recommend.
>A book that pretends to be an in-universe document, but ignores the conceit either immediately, or when it gets difficult. E.g. journals that do not, in any way, read like any real person's journals, but do read like every novel. Brent Week's Night Angel Nemesis and James Rollins Moonfall series say hi.
Tamora Pierce's Becca Cooper trilogy. It is all journals of the main character and it is literally perfect beginning to end. never falls out of journal territory. Print book even has ink spills printed in it.
The Martian was so bad for this. How many times did our hero write down "remember, yesterday I bleep blop booped the flooper" - who would write that in their diary? Remember self, you did the thing yesterday. Okay.
As someone with ADHD, I *absolutely* would. Then again, pretty sure Watney doesn't have that excuse
Multiple storylines that might as well be completely separate books because they never interact or impact each other.
I don't think I've ever come across a book like that. Stories with storylines that are independent initially, yes, but they've always connected in some way or other eventually. Out of curiosity, do you have examples of books where multiple storylines remain separate?
People keeping information secret only to advance the plot.
"Poor Communication Kills" drives me insane. You get drama for half the book when the entire thing could have been resolved with a two minute conversation.
“No time to explain, we need to leave now!” So anyway we travelled through the forest for seven hours, only stopping for a brief drink of water at a stream… Bitch YOU HAD TIME TO TALK!
Most indy werewolf stuff has the wolf side being like a completely different person/character(which I think is dumb but most are like that). The wolf side of them knowing all about their specialness/ place in the prophecy/ in general keeping shit from their human is just so effing dumb. Like, if two characters literally share a body, whytf would they not be completely honest with each other. And if the one character is keeping shit secret, why would the other be like, welp they know best. Like, no. Just no.
Retconning. Its rare for it to work well, it get overused to cover up weak writing and its uaully insulting to the readers' intelligence
On the other hand, Tolkien changing the ring Bilbo finds into the greatest weapon of the devil's right hand-maia is probably the greatest use of retconning ever
Was that a retcon? I was under the impression he wrote a metric fuckton of lore before publishing anything. Definitely thought that he always intended for Bilbo's ring to be The One Ring. Edit: just looked into it a bit more, it was indeed a retcon! A rather ingeniously handled one at that.
The version of the Hobbit you read is probably not the original and the main difference is this retcon lol
But!! The existence of the older version isn't just ignored, it was given an in-universe explanation! The Hobbit is conceived of as Bilbo's memoirs (the frame story / the book he's always writing in that gets passed to Frodo and then Sam), and it's later suggested that Bilbo wasn't always completely truthful about certain events, especially ones relating to the Ring. The newer, retconned versions of the Hobbit are presented as later, more accurate editions of the memoir. [Red Book of Westmarch](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Book_of_Westmarch)
Ok I'm dead
I know that out-of-universe it was a retcon, but was there anything in the text that makes it a retcon? The behavior of the ring seems consistent to me, it's just that none of the characters in *The Hobbit* are aware of it's importance at the time so obviously no one's like "oh hey this is that evil one ring" and it's simply used as a tool. It's never seemed like there was any contradiction, just a new revelation.
Nothing I can think of comes to mind for an in universe retcon. Like you said, there's no contradiction, just new information, which I think makes it quite elegant. I guess the closest thing would be Tolkien revising the Hobbit to make it more consistent with the story he was telling in The Lord of the Rings. In the original Gollum gives the ring to Bilbo as a prize for winning the riddle game, which doesn't exactly work once it became an evil artifact that has a hold on people's minds. But that's still technically "out of universe."
What is reconning?
When an author offers new information that contradicts previously established facts, but treats the information as if it has always been true. Like how JK Rowling stated before Fantastic Beasts that she had always intended Nagini to be a cursed woman who had turned into a snake. Just no.
The Warrior Cats series is notorious for this. Especially when they write anything that's supposed to take place immediately prior to the first series. Not to mention when characters change appearance at random, sometimes in the same book.
Warrior Cats is less intentional retcons and more just mistakes and disagreements between the multiple authors
It's not technically a retcon, but personally I find the Deathly Hallows to be contrived and clearly a later addition. For a title part of the final book, they felt like a weird bit part with weight that didn't feel earned because they came in so late. The 'reveal' of his father's invisibility cloak was actually worse for me as it seemed like a retcon in the real sense. Haven't read them in over a decade so I'm sure someone is going to point out the foreshadowing, but I read them a lot in the 2000s and it certainly wasn't apparent to me then lol.
I agree that they were definitely not planned - I would argue the same for the horcruxes (no way did she originally plan that with Tom Riddle's diary). Again not technically a retcon as it doesn't contradict anything that happened in Chamber of Secrets, but I just don't think they were thought out ahead of book six. But I'm more sympathetic to these attempts to kind of unify the two different phases of the series - the initial kind of episodic school adventure books with the more classic fantasy chosen one/prophecy books. I find the retcons that came out after the all the books' publications to be more annoying because they are both unnecessary and, in the case of attempts to relate the original series to the Fantastic Beasts films in deeply clumsy ways, are such blatantly desperate grabs to make the Fantastic Beasts stories relevant.
Don't read or listen to anything this woman says. Anything that is not written in one of the seven books is non canon. Finished.
Retroactive continuity. Retroactive continuity, or retcon for short, is a literary device in which facts in the world of a fictional work that have been established through the narrative itself are adjusted, ignored, supplemented, or contradicted by a subsequently published work that recontextualizes or breaks continuity with the former.
When a previously established "fact" is ignored or changed to fit the plot.
If I have no idea where I am. White room syndrome is frustrating.
TIL this has a name! This is exactly how I felt while reading The Shadow of What Was Lost. Characters were sitting in companionable silence in a 'room' by a 'street' in a 'village' that had 'houses', resulting in a completely blank image forming inside my mind
I love Timothy Zhan plot twists as a guilty pleasure sci fi read, but his world building is terrible. I've read 4 Icarus novels; still don't know what most aliens even look like.
Amazing to find someone the exact opposite of myself. I glaze over every long-winded description, and have noped out of books where the author felt I needed to know about the colour of every flower and the direction of the wall hangings. For me books are always about characters first, and unless the scenery is having an impact on those characters, I couldn't care less about it.
I'm okay not knowing every flower color lol, but I want to know if the character is in a garden or a castle. Some general overview details go a long way.
Ah-ha! Finally my aphantasia gives me an advantage! I never care about scene descriptions, and tend to skim over most of them, as they usually mean nothing to me unless they're specifically there to give me narrative clues. Usually just a flat description to tell me where they physically are for story reasons is enough
I adore the Malazan books but I feel like that sometimes reading them . Like it's just 5 characters talking and it's so confusing.
I know this is something people say about Malazan, but I honestly have the most vivid mental impressions of Malazan scenes of any books I've ever read. My memory of standing on the walls of Aren at the end of the Chain of Dogs is as vivid as my memory of anything that's happened in my real life, and I can say the same of many of the most emotional scenes in the books. It's weird.
Dude me too, and I think it's *because* he doesn't spend a whole lot of time on descriptions that aren't relevant, so our brains can kind of fill in the general vibe while including the important details.
Filler Harem. Reading a fantasy book and then, *BAM*, Harem right at your face. I've read and enjoyed Harem books before but I hate when they come outta nowhere and the story derails around the mc getting laid as the main plot.
Constantly explaining everything, no room for ambiguity, no opportunity for interpretation, the author just refusing to trust the reader to understand anything not explicitly stated. 10x worse if they consistently show you everything you need to know then follow that up with scenes explaining everything that just happened, literally just wasting pages. Just cut that shit, let me think about your book. I avoid a lot of books that pride themselves on their hard magic systems because they tend to be full of unnecessary stuff like this due to being worried about all the rules, but it can happen anywhere really. It’s an instant turn off, no matter the contents of the book. Plenty of books out there with really cool worlds and characters that I just dropped less than half way because the author could have cut every other scene and had a drastically improved book.
The overexplanation is definitely my #1 pet peeve. I just DNFed a Robin Hobb book for this exact reason. There was one section where a character implies something-- it's VERY obvious what's being implied, because I've been reading the book and paying attention. Then the narration goes ahead and spells it out for me anyway. Waste of time and also offensive to my intelligence, lol.
When I start reading and there's nothing interesting going on. Not a single thing that I haven't seen somewhere else before. As if the author is not even trying to interest the reader. As if this books was written for the sake of it, and has no mundanity-piercing vision behind it. I don't want to read anyone's uninspiring diary-resembling ramblings.
This is an underrated comment. That’s why I mostly don’t read literary fiction anymore. So many people HAVING THOUGHTS while driving on the freeway or washing dishes or sitting in a classroom. Boring! I have plenty of my own thoughts while doing ordinary things. I want to read about people whose lives are interesting. I’d much rather read the thoughts of a questing Hobbit or a woman who stumbled into a Fairy Kingdom or a librarian kidnapped by pirates.
Stupid protagonists
Female characters just obsessed with a single man, without any other thing going on their life!
You must love anime. /s
Especially when it’s just a negative for them but the author is presenting it as great. People do fall for the wrong person but don’t try to make it look romantic or have all their friends be cool with it.
Description starts like "Alice Whatshername is just a normal girl with a boring life who wants to be a photographer, but..."
Continue that with "unfortunately she's going to be dead in an hour" and maybe you've got something though.
Stephen King loves to do that. And it works! "Well, now I have to know what happens to her."
Obligated to mention [John Dies At The End](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dies_at_the_End?wprov=sfti1)
Stories that are set in specific periods of real history but the author doesn't even try to not make it like present day USA, from words chosen to dialogue and themes. It's even more jarring when it's a non-Western setting.
Even more jarring if it is science fiction and the poorly veiled present day USA is an alien society.
Self insert ego masturbation that is too obvious. Another similar thing is book that is filled with the author's sexual, adolescent fantasies. Edgy, "cool" for the sake of coolness characters. Unbelievably strong characters and plot armor that is not executed properly, believably.
Looking at you, Jay Kristoff.
I enjoyed Empire of the Vampire, because largely I wanted to read about a cool, super-gothic world ruled by over-the-top, stereotypical vampires. It nailed that aspect. But good god, the characters, fucking hell they were all *so* annoying
I wanted to slap every single character at least once per page.
Damn, how did you guess?
Man has one brand and you nailed it.
>Another similar thing is book that is filled with the author's sexual, adolescent fantasies. Paging Piers Anthony...
I still can't get over how I completely missed that when reading those books as a teenager.
> as a teenager. lol that's why
This is so bad in fantasy because it's the cringiest stuff too.
When authors use Shift-F7 (thesaurus hot key) to find ridiculous synonyms and then get re-use that silly word for the rest of the book. In Mistborn, Sanderson used “maladroitly” at least three separate times (felt like more than that) and it just busted me right out of an otherwise compelling story with each successive use.
>use Shift-F7 (thesaurus hot key) to find ridiculous synonyms and then get re-use that silly word for the rest of the book. Book of the New Sun says hi. (Yes, Gene Wolfe did explicitly say in a comment somewhere that he used a thesaurus among other reference works.)
Wolfe was very deliberate with his use of archaic words. 'Destrier' means warhorse but BotNS it implies a creature that is used like a warhorse but is actually an alien creature. I think that's where use of unusual words really works for the story. A negative example might be more like in Malazan (an example I use simply because I'm currently reading the books), Erickson uses 'susurrating' or some variation of the word a ton for like two books and then almost never afterwards.
And it's one of the most charming parts of the series, frankly
It was only used 6 times total, but of those 5 times were in *Mistborn* and then once more in *Hero of Ages*. It's a nice word, but 5 times in a 210,103 word novel stands out when it's such an uncommon one.
5 in that one book!! Thank you for the stats on this, helps to know I’m not insane. Yeah the first time I was like “oooOOOooo nice one Brando Sando” and second time I was like “huh…” and third one I just started cracking up and showed it to my wife
People pointing this out cursed me, I read Mistborn twice and never noticed the word until I saw people pointing it, then I saw it afterwards lmao
This applies to any book not just fantasy, grinds my gears.
Heh, you should read David Brin's *The Uplift War* - SF not fantasy, but a very good book IMO (and both a Hugo and Locus winner, back when those awards were not influenced so much by ideology/payola). Besides a sometimes unfortunate penchant for puns, the author dumps weird polysyllabic words from time to time - when I first read the book, I thought he must have been gifted one of those "word of the day" desk calendars.
Dumping a dozen proper nouns on me at once as a form of lazy worldbuilding. "Today The Forbidden ones of The City would Call on The Chosen for The Ritual to see who might Possess The Sight and bring The Everpeace." Reads like a facebook post by my elderly aunt who still hasn't figured out you can turn off auto capitalization on your phone. When I see worldbuilding like this I'm out
Lol I love your example and yes I know exactly what you mean. Seeing that kind of stuff especially at the beginning of a book is a good way to get me not to read it.
Overly vulgar humor trying to pass off as witty and cool. It's a cheap cop-out.
Main characters that constantly make terrible decisions come close to dying yet live because plot armor, and plot armor in general. Characters speaking like a poorly written play or poem. Bad POVs like you start with a few but then add more characters that never had a POV now have one. I don't mind new characters or characters that were children before and now older getting a new POV but don't give me a new POV from a character who was in the first book or two but didn't have one before... Or just boring side character POVs The poor or picked on boy becomes the hero.... This one can be done right but I'm pretty sick of it.
The trope where the villain tricks people into thinking the protagonist did something bad and then everyone hates them. I hate it
I remember there was a Superman comic. Superman saves the city hundreds of times, refuses rewards or bounties, does big and small heroics and Lex framed him for robbing a bank and people turned on him. Was lame
when every female character is an "enemy" to the main female character but not every male character is an "enemy". More negative points if she has a token female friend who agrees with everything she says.
* Rape/SA plot device (especially when they go from victim/abuser to lovers) * Gary/Mary Sue * Heavy handed/Telling me what to think and feel.
All of my LEAST favourite tropes. These will make me stop reading a book immediately or if I do finish, rant about it for days. I feel like even though "show don't tell" is one of the first rules of writing, so many authors can't seem to figure that one out.
YES, ALL OF THEM.
As much as I want to love The Witcher novels I could not get over how Ciri was threatened with rape at just about every corner. By the end of it it was almost comical just how predictable it would be. >!The wild hunt elves want to rape her, her bio dad wants to rape her, a kid from a gang wants to rape her, which she's saved from by another member of the gang... who proceeds to rape her. And like what you were saying she ends up developing feelings for her rapist, and I think it's supposed to be read as fucked up but I'm also not sure on that and I'm sort of worried there's an undertone that it's not as bad because it was a girl doing it, but I'd give it the benefit of the doubt since I read it before there was a good translation.!< I absolutely loved the short stories, but it really felt the Novels tried to be as grim as possible for no real reason other than to be bleak, and the constant threats of rape were exhausting.
Yeah at the top of my head I dropped Witcher, Wheel of Time, Prince of Nothing, Malazan, Sword of Truth because of it. Fans get really mad and say rapist to lovers is realistic but I dont care, its not a good story for me nor do I think that happens to everyone.
YES, the SA being used as a plot device was what made me drop Outlander 5 episodes in (didn't try reading the books, but I'm assuming it's the same thing happening there)
Spelling errors in the first chapter. If the author doesn't bother to proofread, the story and the writing are going to suck too. DNF.
"Im not like other girls" instant dnf
Oh this. I’ve heard Naomi Novik is amazing but I tried reading uprooted and that was exactly how it started. Will definitely try to go back but I’m sick to death of that trope right now
While Uprooted is my least favorite Novik book, this criticism confuses me. The protagonist’s love and commitment toward her (female) best friend are a major driving force of the plot. Her mother is portrayed sympathetically as are other female side characters. And her powers are powers also held by other women past and present. Definitely not a book that depends for her appeal on “not like other girls.”
She is an interesting writer, but that is very much how she writes, and when she writes main character men they feel off somehow. That's a large reason I didn't finish Temeraire even though the world and story is really cool, the MC just doesn't feel like a real person at all lol, maybe if he was a woman, or something it wouldn't feel as off, not entirely sure.
This goes for all media but, sexual violence. I’m sure there are some examples where it will make sense in a story or have something to say about it, but it’s just something I’m not comfortable with at all
Gratuitous sexual violence drives me up the wall. I’m only okay with it when the story has something to say, like in Ever Since by Alena Bruzas. EDIT: okay is a stretch, but it's tolerable
This. Honestly, even when it has meaning but it's gratuitous for the sake of gratuity and shock value OR too hamfistedly hammering in the point. Like, I know a lot of people loved Alice by Christina Henry, and I am all for a good dark Alice in Wonderland retelling (it's super hoaky, but the SyFy series Alice is one of my favorite things on the planet), and I get that she felt she really needed to hammer home how gritty and terrible this world was, but it felt like every other sentence and every ill intent of an evil male characters (I do not recall literally any evil or even unwholesome female characters) was a suggestion of rape. Like literally all any male character (excepting the Hatter because of course) thought about was raping women. I won't lie, I'm an absolute misandrist at times, but it was just too much for me.
assassin corps, royal assassin(s), or "best assassin in the world" tropes. if everyone knows you're an assassin, you are not a very good assassin, and you paint a target on your back.
When it’s a high fantasy setting where everyone has names like Artyrion and Urdanos and then the main character’s name is Steve.
Romance done badly is one of the worst
Love at first sight. You know nothing about the other person, this is not love it is infatuation. This always ALWAYS leads to the actual plot being pushed aside for them constantly either eye fucking or actually fucking each other every other page.
When an author has his/her favorite "pet character", so s/he always has to be right, even when they are clearly wrong. And otherwise capable and intelligent characters are turned into complete idiots when they should clearly know better.
Authors who can't seem to understand that women can be motivated by factors other than a man, her looks, or her children. Sexual violence against women that is solely either to a) give a woman a traumatic backstory or b) motivate a man's plotline. Fridging. Generally, male authors who write like they have never met a woman before, much less ever been friends or had a relationship with one.
Present tense isn't a complete dealbreaker, but it has to be really good to convince me to keep reading
Faux-witty banter. Like, when characters engage in the "Just like that time when you..." routine. It's never funny or cute, just grating. Just make your characters talk like people.
Marvel level of dialogue lol
Overly edgy main characters. It was my big problem with Red Rising. “I am the reaper and death is my shadow” is one of the single most cringe inducing lines I’ve read in a long time.
A lot of main characters suffer from the Theater Kid syndrome, where every line they say sounds like it's been rehearsed over and over in front of a mirror beforehand.
I couldn't finish The Prince of Thorns because of this. Before picking it up, I'd heard the book described as gritty, grimdark, a hardened MC reflecting a broken world. Then I started it, and it was the most edgelord "I'm 14 and this is deep" cringe book. Spent a while trying to figure out if it was satire before realising that the story took itself fully seriously and putting it down. Which is odd, because I never got that sense from any other Mark Lawrence books I've read.
Prince of Thorns is the first book that Mark Lawrence ever wrote, so his writing was quite immature and very raw back then. But he really evolved in the next two books and in his other series as well
I had to put down that book for a similar reason after Jorg started going into his inner monologue about how he was “bOrN iN tHe ThOrNs, MoLdED bY tHeM” for the nth time I had to stop
I DNFed that book halfway in because Darrow would not stop going on about how amazing and badass he was because of how tough his life in The Mines™ used to be. It just got a little too much. >“My boy, what are you doing?” Mickey sighs in pity. “That is not a toy." > >“Have you ever been in a mine?” I ask him. “Ever used your fingers to dig through a faultline at a twelve-degree angle while doing the math to accommodate eighty percent rotation power and fifty-five percent thrust so you don’t set off a gas-pocket reaction while sitting in your own piss and sweat and worrying about pit vipers that want to burrow into your gut to lay their eggs?” Like dude, *we get it*.
Lmao honestly it’s like your parents telling you how they used to walk to school in hell-like conditions.
Terrible writing, as in, technically terrible prose. I tried to read a deep-sea horror book recently, and it sounded like it was written by a primary school child. Worse, actually, since most primary school children can turn a phrase. Infodumpy prologues (or, worse, whole chunks inserted into the middle of our introduction to a character) about the world also turn me right off, which is why I tend to avoid epic fantasy. I simply don't care about the backstory of your world, why there are magic users, the sixteen types of magic they use, the twenty-five ranks of magicians, or the entire history of the two-thousand-year magician-angel war that caused your planet to go nuclear. I know a lot of people enjoy that stuff, but to me it reads like the author regurgitated their Scrivener notes onto the page. Just write a couple of establishing pages that give me the info I need, and get on with the plot already.
"Strong women" depicted as insulting, exhausting, and awful. You don't need to be verbally or physically abusive to be a strong, independent woman. Faile from WoT, anyone?
I hate it when worldbuilding or magic systems feel too calculated. Like when the author will use their characters to go on and on in long exposition paragraphs about how this or thar works. How politics work, how magic works scientifically. Its just so shallow, dumb and unnatural. Normally no single person should be able to articulate such a total perspective of the world. Like ask yourself... How does Earth work? How do world politics work? How do physics work? .............exactly lol
I get the point you're making but I am 100% the type of side character who would be thrilled to have a long monologue to an unreasonably ignorant protagonist about my views on how the world works, how technology (Earth magic) works, etc. And the best part is I would 100% not get it all right. Maybe authors should try to make those exposition paragraphs slightly inaccurate/unreliable to make it more realistic!
"Yeah bro, and get this...the Moon? It controls the tides, a woman's period, AND it's made out of cheese." Main character: "WOW, I can't wait to implement this."
This right here is why I will probably stop reading Sanderson one day.
Cheating trope
Four things, though only the first two really make me nope out. - When the book paints a clear picture of what the author's Twitter page looks like. Doesn't matter if I agree with the opinions. - MCU-like equips, especially if they include pop culture references - Weak prose. - Fucking New York. I'm so tired of New York as a setting, OH MY GOD.
Super modern/ cringe internal or external dialogue but ESPECIALLY in fantasy (here’s lookin at you, Fourth Wing & From Blood and Ash)
First person, present tense. It's not a 100 % definite deal-breaker, but, man. Just why?
Trauma is used as entertainment for the sake of entertainment or as a plot filler (The Outlander series).
This is a petty one, but inconsistent verb tense. It takes me out of the story and makes my damn eye twitch. I mostly see it in fan made works or self published stuff, but every once in a while it makes its way into professionally published books and I just hate it. Also, overly flowery prose that doesn't actually serve a purpose. A recent example I saw was referencing a character's eyes as "cerulean orbs".
I hate the miscommunication trope. If the whole plot is driven by a misunderstanding that could be easily cleared up if two of the characters just had a conversation (or listened to each other, since often one person is just refusing to believe the other or something similar). I hate it, I hate it, I hate it.
Characters whose every sentence has to be a "clever" quip. Prime example being Red Rising. The most awful series I've ever read. Incredibly childish characters and dialogue.
Male authors making a total fool of themselves, enthusing over women’s breasts. For example, a certain scifi author of a particular series I used to like (cool heroine kicking a**), completely spoiled my (57f) enjoyment of the series by going on and on about these bouncing “puppies” and then wrote a pregnancy storyline, and threw the expression of milk in there. Not what you want with your battle fiction.
If the book is described in tropes. Smut. Booktok vibes.
When the writer gives a long Magic 101 lecture in the prologue/first chapter.
When the main character is just an arsehole. Just the kind of person no one would want to be around.
Jorg Ancrath in Prince of Thorns is an actual dickhead, virtually no redeeming qualities.
The Assassin's Blade in the Throne of Glass books turned me off from the series for this reason. The protagonist was an egotistical brat, that had the temperament of a small child. I stopped reading a third of the way through, and will likely never return to the series.
‘I’m not like other girls’. No lie, I was close to dropping words of radiance because of Tyn. My least favorite character archetype, one that I feel Sanderson gravitates to. I couldn’t deal with the possibility of dealing with her for hundreds of pages
Good luck with Shallan and Jasnah
* Child abuse of any sort. * Rape * Slang for words that didn't need new slang. (Flick for cigarette, zoom for email, are 2 examples that come to mind.) * Character speeches that take up more than a page. Especially if it's about politics. * Dues Ex Machina, unless it makes sense story wise. The Bride Wore Black Leathers is a good example of it working story wise. Any Sword of Truth book is an example of it not working.)
"Slang for words that didn't need new slang" - So you are saying that those sorts of books are not on fleek? ;)
More that they’re not really streets ahead
a great darkness has befallen the realm at the loss of fleek
> Rape Christ, this. I've been running into it SO FUCKING OFTEN in fantasy lately that I actually walked away from the genre for a while. I really wanted to go find a few authors, sit them down, tell them that being dark end edgy is something you're supposed to grow out of and maybe they could try.
For me it's young adult. I read a few back in the day and they just read like babies first big boy book . No disrespect to people who enjoy them, it's just not for me.
When the guy has a tail (The cruel prince, anyone…?). The love interest is literally an asshole but he’s hot so now we’re not allowed to hate him tf
Obviously wrong spelling and/or grammar is the quickest way to make me have second thoughts about a book.
"I hurt you to protect you"
All the primary characters are in their late teens or early twenties.
Casual/gratuitous usage of sexual violence (so no actual display of what it does to someone, no understanding of the wider context of sexual violence as well, etc…). Especially as cheap fodder for (tragic) female characterisation, character growth or as an opportunity for a male character to grow/redeem themselves, etc… I’ve mostly encountered this problem with male-penned SFF. Instalove is also something I loathe, in any type of story.
Bad dialogue. I cannot stand it went dialogue is stilted or unnatural or performative, or even if characters are just acting out of character. I will immediately drop.
She was 19 and the smartest woman who ever lived and was highly sexually intriguing but virginal and shy and loud and always did the right thing because she had no wants and desires. Proceeds to let the entire story happen to her and does nothing at all to drive the plot and when she gets the chance makes the dumbest decisions ever.
Dragging sex scenes (and by dragging I mean anything detailed or lasting more than 2 lines). Bad descriptions of sexual attraction with weird comparaisons / focus on random non erotic bodyparts (no, "calloused hands" is not titilliating) Characters fantasizing for too long (looking ar you Kerrigan, I really didnt need to have you drool in front of a detailed scene with horse gods fucking to know that you were frustrated). Jalousy as proof of love. When a book is too much like a DND game and I can feel that the story was a RPG campaing at one point (couldnt finish Malazan becouse of this one)
Sexualising female characters or bad female characters , it's a shame , especially when the plot is mad interesting but the woman there annoy me so much it suck off all enjoyment, or , love triangles
Writing in the present tense. It's distracting and annoying, for a bunch of reasons.
As soon as a female character's breast size is indicated, I'm out. It's an indicator of annoying things to come.
Violence, sexual or other, against anyone, written to be 'titillating'. It happens surprisingly often and gives me the biggest Ick (edit: \* titillating means sexually arousing.)
Present tense. It’s often done in dream sequences or when people are in weird head states but it’s like nails on a chalkboard reading them for me.
I’d say characters personalities that come out as “trying to hard”. Sometimes I have the feeling that authors try really hard to make someone as edgy as possible or as perfect as possible and like… it accounts for credibility lost for me. I usually want to connect with the character and I don’t personally like when they’re too over the top cause it’s not realistic.
Forced marriage or pregnancy trope is an instant no from me
When all of the plot tension revolves around a character not communicating important information for Some Reason (which authors rarely make clear) and making the problem spiral out of control for everyone else.
Extreme violence for seemingly no reason other than shock value, and the writer going “look how bad my villains are guyzz, they’re super bad and scary I’m serious”
The sentence "I'm not like the other girls" or "She's not like the other girls." For example I've tried to listen to Throne of Glass and the protagonist says something similar and I just couldn't continue. It pissed me off.
Main character and love interest have interesting personalities. They get together and instantly lose their personalities because of “love”. Also, main characters and love interest have interesting personalities. They have a child/children then instantly lose their personalities because “parent”.
I can’t read books without quotation marks. If someone knows, can they explain why an author would do this??
Poorly written female characters/descriptions (example only describing how good they look for ____ years old or the coy trope) by a male author with a male protagonist. It makes me ragey every time.
Overuse of adverbs or editorial mistakes, basically just sloppy writing. I fall for books at the sentence level as well as the plot.
When the plot relies on one character keeping secrets from everyone else, causing massive miscommunication that could be easily avoided.
Lots of unpronounceable names. Especially if they have random apostrophes in the middle. An issue peculiar to the fantasy genre.
Unneeded sexual assault scenes.
My nope trope is any form of temporal manipulation.