LogicGunn

Day 13: Squicks - What are some things that squick you in fandom - not necessarily "icky", though it can be. From anything involving blood, to bad grammar.

When it comes to the rules of the English language I'm a very forgiving reader, so if your fics are littered with spelling/grammar errors and overused phrases and Americanisms when it should be Britishisms or vice versa I'm not going to complain and it very likely won't ruin my enjoyment too much, even if/when they're kind of jarring. It certainly won't stop me from leaving kudos. 

(My policy is if I finish a fic, I leave kudos. If I really don't like it, then I won't finish it.) 

Others have mentioned epithets as a squick and I totally get that. I find them confusing, especially when they are used frequently within a body of dialogue. I won't automatically stop reading, but I'll probably have to go slower and/or reread so I can keep track of who's saying/doing what because they don't assign the character to me as easily as a name would and so they alter the flow of the story. I have read a couple of fics where there were so many epithets I just couldn't finish them because I couldn't keep up and it wasn't worth the effort.

On that topic, you really can't overuse character's names in a fic - they become background in the same way all the commonly used words do (the, and, it, when, etc) - so if you're using epithets to avoid that I'd gently encourage you not to do that.

Something I actively dislike is when characters use pet names that are OOC. There are exceptions where a writer has altered the characterisations in their AU enough that it works (without pushing too far into OOC territory), but those are few and far between.

Please don't change the POV within a paragraph. At the very least you need a new paragraph, but ideally, you need a new scene after a line break.

Some of the older fics I've read on AO3 and LiveJournal don't have paragraph breaks. A wall of text is really hard to read, but thankfully it seems like that kind of formatting issue has gone the way of the dinosaurs.

I don't have any trope squicks. I'll read just about any McShep fics with no exceptions (as long as it is a McShep fic and not, you know, a fic where John and Rodney are necking briefly in the background of another ship's fic). Ditto other SGA/SG1 pairings when I'm in the mood to read them. Some of the best fics I've read have had tropes that I'm not all that hyped about, and just because a fic has one of my favourite tropes it doesn't automatically mean I'm going to enjoy it.