Please no

Do you have any pet peeves when it comes to fiction? What's something that really turns you off of an otherwise good story?

Atrocious grammar/spelling from a native English speaker, a big wall of text, three paragraphs of description on a face (which is mostly in Romance books so eh,) PWP/smut, cliches, and if it's fan-fiction having the characters completely OOC to suit the plot as well as gratuitousu Japanezu.

Turn off switches:

Clichés, stale humor, weak characters (development depends on story), To much of a theme (no broader spectrum, but not to broad as to become sloppy), major grammar and English issues (mainly from fellow English writers), pointless narration or unnecessary detailing, cringe causing dialogue, weak verbs and lack of spectrum, bad plot issues and poor relevancy, sarcasm done wrong, and for goodness sake ENOUGH OF THE OVERLY ROMANCING MOOD!

There I think that about covers it. Sorry for the rant, just tried to answer your question accurately.

Interesting you guys mentioned grammar. Me personally I'm fine if the grammar/wording isn't perfect as long as I get an idea what you're trying to get across. Otherwise, I can understand that can be a pet peeve for many if, say, it shows you didn't put effort in proofreading your work at least.

I don't think I have that many pet peeves to be honest. One would probably be if the plot clearly shows the main character is getting everything handled to them and they're not at least struggling on some occasions. Other pet peeve would be if some emotions/thoughts kept getting mentioned that it becomes repetitive. For instance, the narration saying the protagonist thinks the world is bad several times over.

For myself I think the biggest one for me are Gary Stu/Mary Sue characters. Characters that have no/very few weaknesses or flaws are one dimensional and boring. They remove all the suspense from the story that makes you want to keep turning to the next page. There's nothing exciting about reading a story if the ending is clear from the first chapter.

The other one that I'm really not fond of is using canon characters in fan fiction. I don't think you can develop your skills as a writer by trying to portray someone else's characters - you don't learn how to make a good character if you don't practice. These stories also have a tendency to have characters we are familiar with act completely out of character or ignore their histories etc. The whole thing just makes me feel uncomfortable and unsatisfied. I am however completely okay with exploring an existing world with an original cast of characters.

When it comes to the grammar thing, I'm not really a stickler like some people because I think the story, world and characters should take precedence over obscure grammatical rules but if you're a native speaker of a language and a writing a story in said language I would expect the common/well-known grammatical conventions to observed and proper punctuation/spelling.

Pretty much what has been said.

But I really really hate unnecessary description. I really really don't care how good your protagonist's morning is.

gimmepie said:

The other one that I'm really not fond of is using canon characters in fan fiction. I don't think you can develop your skills as a writer by trying to portray someone else's characters - you don't learn how to make a good character if you don't practice. These stories also have a tendency to have characters we are familiar with act completely out of character or ignore their histories etc. The whole thing just makes me feel uncomfortable and unsatisfied. I am however completely okay with exploring an existing world with an original cast of characters.

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I kinda disagree. While I understand a canon character being ooc can be an annoyance for many, I think using canon characters can help you with characterization. When I write canon characters, I study a lot how they talk and act, and this way might give me ideas on how I can have my original characters speak differently for instance. It's very interesting in the Pokemon fandom there's a mix on whether to use canon or original characters while in other fandoms I'm in everyone will read fics that features canon characters. If canon characters isn't your thing, though, then that's okay.

gimmepie said:

The other one that I'm really not fond of is using canon characters in fan fiction. I don't think you can develop your skills as a writer by trying to portray someone else's characters - you don't learn how to make a good character if you don't practice. These stories also have a tendency to have characters we are familiar with act completely out of character or ignore their histories etc. The whole thing just makes me feel uncomfortable and unsatisfied. I am however completely okay with exploring an existing world with an original cast of characters.

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Like Bay, I also kinda disagree, but mostly because when you're writing fan-fiction at all you're already using someone else's ideas to one degree or another. Naturally using canon characters limits your practice in coming up with original characters, but the same thing goes for using the canon setting. It limits your practice in doing your own world-building.

For that matter, if we're talking Pokemon then using the Pokemon species themselves is almost the same thing as using canon characters. I think we often take for granted what a boon it is for us fan writers to have literally hundreds of these imaginatively designed creatures at our disposal, and how much work it took over the years for Sugimori and company to come up with those designs. It's not just artwork; monster design shares elements with character creation in deciding how the Pokemon's personalities complement their biological traits and quirks.

All that said, I too tend to use my own human characters in Pokemon fanfic, but I suspect this is mostly because I've always been drawn more to the world of Pokemon than to the canon characters who inhabit it. I love how much room there is for new stories about new trainers to be told.

Oh, one more funny thing about canon characters in Pokemon in particular: now that the show is 20+ years old, anyone new who joins the show's writing team will probably have grown up with Ash and friends and will basically be writing professional fan-fiction. xD

Bay Alexison said:

It's very interesting in the Pokemon fandom there's a mix on whether to use canon or original characters while in other fandoms I'm in everyone will read fics that features canon characters.

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I think I've noticed that Digimon fan writers almost exclusively use canon characters. That's my excuse for why no one on FFNet has read mine, which doesn't have canon characters, anyway. :P

You make some good points and I'm sure there's plenty of talented writers out there who "borrow" canon characters but the majority of the time - at least it seems that way to me - writers using characters who aren't their own tend to break those characters (often in pretty spectacular ways) whilst it's much harder to completely destroy a setting you haven't created if you know its rules well enough.

That being said, I don't mean to stop people writing what they want to write or to shit on fan fiction or anything. This is just something that tends to put me off of a story myself.

I don't mind a few English/Grammer errors. I make a ton myself :p
One thing I don't like is too much romance. There are whole genres dedicated to that, and if I wanted to read it, I would check out those genres, yet it seems to sneak into every genre.

Smut can really turn me off a novel. I found a really good 'fic once and a few chapters in it got rather 'tongue in cheek' and I ended up putting it down =(

Other things - Canon characters behaving very OOC; 'I looked in the mirror at my brown hair and blue eyes' (Wording is just an example. Mirrors are just too cliche and it feels naive to me. This was one of the first things to put me off reading Divergent!); revealing too much too soon - I like to learn things as the story progresses.

Whereas terrible grammar can be off-putting, everyone has to learn somewhere. So I try not to let that bother me too much and point them out offering suggestions or correcting mistakes. Most writers who are serious about learning and growing really appreciate that, myself being one of them lol. I've learned quite a lot through constructive feedback.

Delirious Absol said:

Smut can really turn me off a novel. I found a really good 'fic once and a few chapters in it got rather 'tongue in cheek' and I ended up putting it down =(

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This reminds me of another point: mislabeling or not putting the correct ratings. If there's gonna be copious amount of gore or abuse, GFDI put it in the tags/labels and definitely don't say it's a G or PG.

CLARIFICATION!

I mean major Grammar errors that aren't relevant to the story of or the character whatsoever. I can let a couple spelling and grammar slide in the first three chapters of reading, but it gets old and leaves a taste of not enough care, when such things persist and give no aid or benefit to the story.

The debate about using canon characters or even world-building limits one creativity because these are information from the "canon", than how about if we are writing a story based on Real-Life world? I don't think the creativity limit is than lesser just because Real-Life "canon" was not copyrighted.
Character proposed a tighter creativity restriction than the world-building, because character is the central piece of one's story, they are moving immediately on every sentence of the fic, unlike the overworld which is the miniascape sandbox, how the characters going to play the sands inside are all up to one's imagination.
So it is understandable one doesn't wanted to write story of canon characters, but rather OK with canon world settings. (Even I don't write story of any canon characters. Well for me, I even altered the canon PokeUniverse greatly, where the PokeUniverse in my fic is no more resembling any canon, but my own universe specifically for my fic)

The pet peeve about fanfic I had in general is: Simplistic
Characterization is too bare bone no flesh and blood no inner depth, they just talk because they need to talk, not because they have any kinds of emotional shout-out. Story plot is too basics where it can be summarize to simply character go to this place doing something then done and go to another place. Villains are there because they need to be there to stir up some drama, not because they are an integral part of the entire story and helps the growth of the protagonist. World-building are exactly copy-paste of the canon without any further explanation shall the canon failed to explained something originally, nor add on anything further or interpret differently if canon itself was illogical. Writing itself is also simplism where it is like writer deemed reader already knew everything of the canon, so dropped all the detailed description and just write the basic information.
This is especially a problem in Pokemon journey fic category.

クリスタル said:

Writing itself is also simplism where it is like writer deemed reader already knew everything of the canon, so dropped all the detailed description and just write the basic information.

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This part stands out for me because I know several readers will actually say leaving out the extraneous info is why people read fanfic. One can argue a lot of original stories people would get bored because of info dump on worldbuilding and likely characters we won't care about. With fanfic, we already know the characters and the world (if it's not like in an au setting), so we're already right into the action. Of course, with journey fics featuring original trainers I assume it falls in the trap of the world building canon-copy paste you mentioned.

Spelling, punctuation and capitalization. Spelling bugs me the most because there's so many tools at your disposal both physical and digital that there should be no real reason for spelling errors. Punctuation or the lack thereof irks me as well. I remember a few months ago a friend of mine sent me some short story he'd wrote that was completely devoid of any kind of punctuation and he acted like it was no big deal. "The idea still gets across, it shouldn't matter where there's a period or comma or whatever."

My pet peeves in a fic:

--Insta-romances--relationships with no buildup and no rocky spots
--corollary to the above--sticking two characters together for the sake of having them create an insta-romance
--Insta-romances for the sake of getting your favorite pair in the bedroom (if you will)
--Violence/sensual scenes for the sake of shock value

My point is, don't just shove a lot of gritty things in there for the sake of being called dark and edgy--have the sex and violence be meaningful to the overall plot--a profanity filled rant may be a powerful scene if you know the person ranting just lost their best friend, for example