Oh look, it's me again, quoting half the thread. And yes, I'm still alive, but I'm busy building my wiki (now also in (bad) english!), making the Dating Sim and having exams the next four weeks.
I'll start this off with a statement that will likely get me flamed: I, for the most part, hate Yaoi and most Yuri. There is nothing worse than seeing your favorite character turned into a overly sexual (often even perverted) gay character who does it with another same-gendered character for little real reason.
So you can dislike different things about a story, but if you don't like the Genre itself, the "don't like don't read"-rule applies. I wouldn't say I hate it, but dislike Yaoi while I have no problem reading Yuri, maybe I would even like it. I'm a man, sue me. It's just my personal taste.
BUT nevertheless the "don't like don't read"-rule is often abused by fanfiction authors who recive a certain amount of critic for their story in general, not for the genre. Well, these people can choke on their words, because before reading a story, I can not know if it's bad in general.
So I'm backing up the second thing I bolded you,
little reason. Generally known as out of character (short: OOC (even in German :D)) this is the cancer to fanfictions. While tendencies are inevitable, the amount I'm speaking of is the amount that makes your brain hurt while reading. Shippings often have a certain amount of OOC, since feelings are still all mysterious to us and so it's not difficult to simply inject a character a "wow, I never noticed what beautiful eyes he/she had"-feeling is all easy. The point is where these things sum up, the character admits his love and the other character directly responses positive (at least after one night of confusion and drama). Generic and unbelievable. How Gothitelle mentioned her story, it seems to be one of these stories where more thought is put into (but I can't know for sure until I read it, you may send me the link?).
And know there is homosexuality. Letting my taste and my believes aside (as one should always do when speaking about a topic he dislikes for no logical reason), there remains the world where the story takes place. I will now speak about Pokémon in specific, but you can apply the following to many other animes/cartoons. They were developed for children. Parents generally don't want their children to watch "homosexual series" (e.g. Spongebob in the USA). So it's just natural to not see homosexual tendencies. But regardless of why the fictional world is a certain way, it still is and thus has to considered as canon. As we never see homosexuality in Pokémon (until someone does funny interpretions), it would be understandable a fanfiction writer considers it as "not normal" in this world (which is good, because writing Yaoi/Yuri would even be more difficult = challanging ~ story gets better). But you have to at least admit it's everything else then common. And that's where the downfall starts: Badfic writers don't give a damn. Sometimes you can see little trys but they will be forgotten soon. Like "Gary: »Oh, Ash has such wonderful eyes… OMYGOSH what am I thinking?!!1!!!!!!!!!?«" But later "Gary: »My love is eternal and herpderp, hurr durr!«" They do not really question their unsual feelings, they just pretend to at the start and never do again. No doubts rising after two weeks of being together. And the bystanders either are totally okay with that, without even wondering, or the characters recive all the hate. Bystanders only have two possible opinions.
That's why writing shippings good is difficult and writing homo shippings good is at least twice the difficulty. But many writers don't know about the difficulty and so they don't notice they're fabricating badfics...
Good Yaoi/Yuri is very, very rare (and I'm not the one to find it)
The first thing I thought of was bad spelling and grammar.
If it's only that, and else a masterpiece, I'm satisfied and will have fun finding funny mistakes. But on the other side, yes, it's a thing to make badfics even worse.
As for what I hate in fanfics: fics where it's obvious that the author is trying too hard to impress people in fandom. Instead of writing a fic that they would care about, the author becomes so focused on being so different and "right" in the eyes of everyone that could possibly read their fic. And the whole thing becomes a mess as the writer tries to please everyone.
Don't know how to translate Mitmach-Fanfictions correctly, but the main thing is a lot of (teenage) people create Mary Sues / Gary Stues and they will be brought together into a Badfic and it's all herpderp and hurrdurr. Nevertheless the roastings of these fics can be very amusing. I would recommend
one, but it's German after all.
And overly-confusing plots because the author wants to be mysterious. If readers can't even keep the characters straight because the author thinks it would be impressive to never use any character's name (instead just relying on over-the-top descriptions), there there's a slight problem.
Oh damn, the German Harry Potter and Naruto Fandomes are poisoned with it, POISONED.
I don't want to be at the receiving end of negative reviews (who does?)
I do. A lot of negative, constructive critic is better than no one, and believe me, constructive critic itself is very, very rare. You can throw a party for everyone you recieve. I have to look desperately for readers to critize me. (Or for readers in general, lol, but I would rather have no comments than "Thiz story is sooooo~~~ good, please write on quickly" comments.
These have no soul.
I'm still nervous about harsh reviews that make me doubt myself. I mean, what if the whole story is really utter garbage? What would be the point in writing any more chapters?
Doubting yourself is, from one point of view, the thing you want. If you would never doubt yourself you're most likely to become resistent to critic and as such, a badfic writer. But as I see, you are already doubting yourself enough, so don't worry and post it :D
And it won't be utter garbage. You can make a good story out of everything! Just image how ridiculous it would be to write a story about Nazis on the moon. Well, see how there's Iron sky coming? (But I'm sad it's sure the good guys will win by default.)
Feist's Corollary to Watt-Evans' Law said:
There is no idea so stupid that a sufficiently talented writer can't make a readable story out of it.
The point in writing more chapters? Well, obviously no one, as long as you haven't corrected the big mistakes in the previous ones. That's what I'm doing right now. I was currently writing Chapter 6, then someone came and told me Chapter 3 is utter garbage (of course in a constructive way). And even if Chapter 3 isn't that relevant or anything, I would like to rewrite it before going on.
So, post it so you can improve, unless you don't think but know a chapter is garbage. I rewrote my Chapter 1 like 6 times completely before posting it.
(not 100% true, I rewrote it 3 times, posted it, noticed it wasn't very exiting and decided to start the story 6 years later (in story time), where I rewrote the new chapter 3 times again. And now that are 20 pages (A4) with little (but existing) logic mistakes and just above average writing.)
I also hate when people mindlessly praise someone's work.
Hey guys, you must totally read White Night Imagination (and therefore learn German)!
Reasoning cancelled due to low budget.
Usually it's justified with "But what if the reader doesn't know what Pokémon look like?!", but if that is actually the case and they're choosing to read Pokémon fanfiction anyway
And that's why I won't read anything here anytime soon :(
(Damn creators, why did they changed names of Pokémon for different languages!)