[ SECRET POST #5828 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #5828 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.


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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 25 secrets from Secret Submission Post #834.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

Popular fics you just can't stand

[(Anonymous)]

Got a fic your fandom loves but that drives you up the wall? Tell me about it!

Puttin' mine in the replies, too.

Re: Popular fics you just can't stand

[(Anonymous)]

All the Young Dudes. Massively popular HP fanfic about Remus and the Marauders and I just can't stand the characterization of anyone in it. Bleh.

Re: Popular fics you just can't stand

[hey_hey_hey]

I was going to say that and I've never even read. I've never liked those super popular fics, see Shoebox.

Re: Popular fics you just can't stand

[(Anonymous)]

Lmao @ that title. Never read it, but man some characterizations just miss the mark and yet a sizeable chunk of fandom just swoons.

Re: Popular fics you just can't stand

[greghousesgf]

never read it but I've got that song stuck in my head now

Re: Popular fics you just can't stand

[meadowphoenix]

this is on me because I never read it but shoebox.

Re: Popular fics you just can't stand

[hey_hey_hey]

Shoebox Project? You didn't miss anything. The drawings were cute, though.

Re: Popular fics you just can't stand

[(Anonymous)]

Tbh the story wasn't great but I loved the doodles and commitment to the different handwriting in notes.

Re: Popular fics you just can't stand

[(Anonymous)]

It was a great ride at the time, but one you couldn't revisit.

Re: Popular fics you just can't stand

[philstar22]

This Game We Play. Was for a long time the most popular Melkor/Sauron fic. And I really hate the take not only on the relationship but on the characters. Especially Sauron. Ugh. I hate that fic. Sad because I actually really like the author's writing style, and some of her other fics are really good. But the characters are just all wrong.

Re: Popular fics you just can't stand

[(Anonymous)]

SA

Man, it sucks when someone's writing style is good but they're getting the characterization wrong.

Re: Popular fics you just can't stand

[(Anonymous)]

this blood in my mouth in the Untamed fandom. Sizhui is mad at the Lan’s for their part in the siege of the burial mounds so he goes and joins the Jiang sect, y’know, the sect that led the siege led by the man who (in the show) is at least partially responsible for the death of his father. Lan Zhan just…goes with him and swears fealty to JC too. It’s so stupid and so OOC for literally everyone involved but people just want t and I don’t get it.

Re: Popular fics you just can't stand

[(Anonymous)]

Just love it lol. I’m bad at words.

Re: Popular fics you just can't stand

[(Anonymous)]

SA

All right, so my fandom has this fic that's close to 200,000 words long, 2500+ comments, 4000+ kudos. Shows up on nearly everyone's rec list. Has some technically good writing, in that you can tell the author has studied the craft and knows how to plot, pace, etc.

But I hate it. This is my list of reasons:

1) The title is not original. In fact, it's very common; if you search for it on AO3 without specifying fandom, you will get a page of hits.

2) The characterization for the female lead is off. She's transformed into a petulant teenager (and the bizarre thing is that this isn't out of hatred: the author adores her! The primary ship involves her!).

3) There's a courtroom scene that makes absolutely zero sense. It takes place in a military context, in which court-martial might be appropriate (although that'd be stretching it, with the scenario the author devised), but a standard court proceeding would not. It comes across as the author wanting to flex the fact that she's in law school.

4) It turns a character who is, in canon, somewhat morally grey but definitely on the side of the good guys into a mustache-twirling villain, which no explanation for it, and no explanation for why the command structure around him goes along with it. There are people who outrank him just being like, "well, Dave's being kind of an asshole here, but I guess there's nothing we can do!"

5) For plot purposes, it has a military outfit turn against people who have saved their asses twice and contributed to them having their single most significant victory.

6) It has one of the most offensive metaphors for coming out that I think I've ever seen. A man who has defected from the fascist-coded enemy wants to keep wearing the enemy's uniform, because that's who he is. The soldiers who are uncomfortable at him wearing the fascist enemy's uniform are presented as bigoted. He's ultimately allowed to keep wearing the enemy's uniform to show that the good guys are embracing his identity.

7) It also has this offensive section where, in a clunky attempt to avoid ableism, she frames a man wanting to keep the use of his legs as being because he has PTSD and needs to keep running from his problems.

8) She originally advertised the piece as eventually having smut. Instead of admitting that the plot wouldn't allow for it (because it really wouldn't. There's just no good place to insert sex, and that's fine! Sometimes you realize that the things you intend aren't going to pan out, and you adjust accordingly), she declared that every single character is asexual. Every. Single. One -- except for one guy. She describes him as the "token allosexual," and he happens to be the only character throughout the whole piece who has zero sexually or romantically charged interactions with anyone, making him, in fact, the most likely to be ace. The two characters in the primary ship have a make-out session in a supply close and are written as experiencing sexual attraction to one another (they very explicitly want. His lips on her neck feel like being shot through with lightning!), but she says that they're asexual. Because...they told her that they are.

I still can't believe I read the whole thing. I think I just wanted to be sure about it.

Re: Popular fics you just can't stand

[kaijinscendre]

I've tried reading these Sansa Stark fics so many times.

the lone traveller, standing strong https://archiveofourown.org/works/12354225/chapters/28101510

Rose Fangs and Wolf Thorns https://archiveofourown.org/works/7333300/chapters/16657966

There is also a really popular Witcher author whose name I can't recall. But her fics are really popular but every time I try to read them I give up a couple chapters in.

Re: Popular fics you just can't stand

[(Anonymous)]

Mystrade fic where they play socccer. If you read the ship u know the one. Never could get into it.

Re: Popular fics you just can't stand

[(Anonymous)]

Twist and Shout, babey. I hate everything about it.

Re: Popular fics you just can't stand

[pantswarrior]

It's not like the fic itself actually drives me up the wall so much as... the fic I first thought of was objectively not well written from a technical or characterization standpoint, like the tense kept switching within a single sentence and the author kept forgetting which pronouns they were using for characters within the same scene, that kind of poor writing. And it was like 1000 words to "resolve" a pretty heavy plot point. But the subject matter hit the collective fandom id at just the right time for that fandom (think the fic equivalent of "first person to cosplay this newly revealed character in a popular franchise") and so of course it got tons of hits/kudos/comments, and I kind of was sitting there going "...Seriously? Yeah, uh, I'll wait."

I don't know if it actually was super popular for long, since I didn't go looking for it again or anything, just read it once and occasionally saw it while scrolling through the fandom listing until it was off the top page. Maybe now that many more people have written fic about the same subject, it's gone cold. But oyyy, talk about high reward for low effort, lol.

Re: Popular fics you just can't stand

[(Anonymous)]

"Can't stand" is a bit strong, but I'm always frustrated by Astolat's Drarry fics. She's a fantastic writer, obviously. I mean, she's won literal awards for her original fantasy novels, and I enjoyed the heck out of her novel Uprooted. So when I say she's an excellent writer, I mean it.

But I dislike how she writes Drarry and I dislike how she writes Harry, and I dislike how she writes Draco. To me, her Draco almost always feels vaguely Mary Sue-ish, in that he's right about very nearly everything all the time, and smarter than everyone, and almost everything important that happens in most of her Drarry fics is accomplished by him, while everyone else mostly gets in the way or plays the sidekick or stares after him with heart eyes (Harry specifically does a lot of all three). And also, he's usually a prick. Which, fair enough, it is Draco Malfoy we're talking about--but I feel like the narrative never adequately calls him on it, and usually validates him every which way.

What's funny is that her fics are still good. Like, I firmly stand by everything I just said, but also, the writing is still extremely solid. I just personally dislike the way she characterizes Harry, Draco, and their relationship, most of the time.

I would say that of the fics of hers I've read, The Compact is the most exemplary of what I'm describing here, while Slithering is the fic of hers that works the best for me, probably because when she isn't writing Draco interacting with other people I absolutely love how she writes him, and in Slithering Draco spends a lot of time by himself. Honestly, the first two thousand words of Slithering are some of the best words of fanfic I've ever read, just utterly phenomenal work. Which is part of what makes it so weird that the majority of her Drarry fanfic just leaves me feeling annoyed and unsatisfied.

Re: Popular fics you just can't stand

[(Anonymous)]

Shinji and the Warhammer 40k, because it manages to miss the point of both properties.

And Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, just because it is dripping with authorial smugness.

And any Ranma fic written by Rewind Gone Nuts, because they suck.

Re: Popular fics you just can't stand

[(Anonymous)]

"Embers" for AtLA
I don't even like Katara myself but wow the hate she gets from the author?

Re: Popular fics you just can't stand

[(Anonymous)]

A Thing of Vikings. So much Stu.

Re: Popular fics you just can't stand

[(Anonymous)]

Kyon: Big Damn Hero.

Re: Popular fics you just can't stand

[(Anonymous)]

I am not going to name it since my fandom is small, so saying popular is a bit overkill. But fandom is obsessed with this fucking coffee shop AU. Not only this fandom is fantasy so a lot of AUs are just annoying, but I don't know who the characters in this thing are

Re: Popular fics you just can't stand

[cakemage]

Late to the party as usual, but I had to take the opportunity to share my hatred of the "Just Between" series that was considered to be the gold standard for J/7 fanfic for so long. It was completely OOC and had this gratingly smug and condescending tone and was overall just so twee that to this day I still can't understand its popularity. I didn't care for the smutty parts either, but that was more due to my personal dislike of strap-ons and dildos than anything else.