Back button offenses

[emmagrant01]

What are your back button offenses in fic? Things that will make you hit the back button and stop reading, no matter how promising the premise/summary/pairing?

A really big one of mine is the use of epithets for characters. No, seriously: a single instance of "the blond Slytherin" or "the detective" (or god forbid, "the older man" - especially from said older man's POV!) and I'm out of there. I can put up with too many adverbs, overuse and abuse of dialogue tags (meaningful glance at JKR here), and even every other sentence starting with a gerund (though I mentally restructure the sentences after a while), but not character euphemisms.

In my decade of reading fanfic, my experience has been that epithet use is typically a symptom of a larger problem and is almost always accompanied by a whole host of other writing problems that will distract me from the fic to the point that I don't enjoy it. At all.

So I back button. :-P

You?

Posted via LiveJournal app for iPhone.

Edit: I finally got home from work and got everyone fed and had a chance to sit down and check email, and y'all have been having a whole huge conversation on here! Carry on, then. :-P

Comments

[lady-of-clunn.livejournal.com]

I haven't come across this joke, either and I must say I don't get it.

What is a boy scout anyway?? I have a very vague mental image of children in some sort of uniform...

[katieupsidedown.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it's a club for little boys, but the relevant bit of the joke is that the boy scout motto is "be prepared". Character A is joking that B is a boy scout because he's so prepared... with lube.

[nimielle.livejournal.com]

Just reading "be prepared" and I have this song stuck in my head! XD