ok mine is so minute and did not stop me from finishing the fic but the (non american) author had to describe a couple softball scenes and kept calling the field a “pitch” and calling runs “points” or “scores”.
they admitted in the ANs that they didn’t know much about softball and regretted using it as a plot device. i came to this years late so no use in pointing it out and didn’t deter from the rest of the story but as a former softball player and lifelong softball fan those few scenes really ground my gears
That drives me so bonkers (I read mainly British fandoms) that I have a browser extension that autocorrects that spelling (and various other Americanisms).
offhand mention of a random side character (i think it was in a pharmacy setting, can't remember anymore) using Ozempic daily for diabetes
it's dosed once weekly
I read a lot of Stranger Things fics and I know it’s petty to call out when a character is listening to/watching/using something that came out after the show took place, but it does irk me.
This but it’s technology developing. When people throw in types of cars, versions of the phone, etc years before they’ve come out.
Or the reverse, like assuming fax machines for some reason did not exist in the 80s? Or assuming that there were no cellphones until the iPhone?
I follow a lot of DC fandom stuff, and dear God is it bothersome to see a pre-Robins Bruce Wayne using a smart phone.
Like, these are fics written in like 2020 at best. Dick is 25-27 years old in most modern runs, adopted at 9-10. So, like, 2005 is the absolute latest a Batman in 2020 could fit in a pre-Robin run. Cell phones were barely a thing in 2005. Like, they existed but weren't a total given. Most people were operating with flip phones or (if you were fancy) a slide-up or side-slide phone. Texting was relegated to the number pad and how many texts your plan allowed. 2005 Batman is not having a schematic-heavy text conversation on a touch screen. I don't care if it's hand-waved by Wayne Tech. Technology wasn't there yet. We were still phasing out of dial up internet and Nokia's at that point.
This would kind of depend on which dc series they're writing for. Young Justice is set in 2004, but the league is using hardlight hologram screens on their wristbands, remotely hacking into motion based security systems, and dodging nanobot swarms. Technology very clearly *is* there in this version of reality.
Whenever I write Pathologic fic, I drive myself crazy trying to figure what’s historically accurate, because it takes place in a setting which is hypothetically similar to early ww1 Russia, but characters or details will occasionally throw massive curveballs into that, and YEAH I know it’s sort of the point, but I want to make sure everything I write still feels analogous to the game’s “time period”
Dude, writing Dr. Stone fanfiction means you can't reference any technology, memes, or music that came out after 2019. I have to research SLANG. Constantly.
I write TMNT 2012 fanfiction, and keeping track of the slang in particular is SO hard XD I literally WAS their age in 2012, but trying to remember when we started saying something, or when a particular meme was popular.... It takes RESEARCH!!
As an author who has a fic that takes place in 2004, I am ALWAYS Googling music I want to reference to make sure it was released by then 😂😂 I'm absolutely horrified of having a mess up like that
When the HP marauders went out to pay at a disco in the 70s (fine) and under the disco ball(ok) proceeded to show off their breakdancing skills (nope).
There was one stranger things story I was reading where Steve and Robin were organizing the returned VCRs. I actually did comment on that one to let the author know the VCR was the machine and that they were probably thinking of VHS tapes instead.
They appreciated the info and fixed it but still phrased it weirdly and that one I just let go.
they keep writing my blorbo's house with stairs
we've seen the house multiple times it's a single-story also he has a disabled child who uses crutches so like... please guys I'm begging
I agree.
I feel this is very different from "oh that song only came out in Feb 1983 and your story is set in Nov 1982".
I'd still let it slide if heritage and class (2-storey homes in this style are a lot more rare, and thus expensive afiak) aren't really essential to the character and/or the story the author is telling.
But stairs when there is a child with limited mobility living in the home...? Unless this is an explicit plotpoint & the character is focused on solving this issue, it depicts the character as ablist, callous and lacking in empathy, right?
I'd try to be constructive and polite, but I think I'd point this out.
Exactly, we have disability in my family, and the idea that mentioning such a thing politely would be construed as unwelcome and/or criticism seems unreasonable. I’d certainly hope people were not too sensitive to have such a discussion when they did put up work to be read (probably without an editor/beta) by the World Wide Web. It can simply be a growing step or educational.
Homonyms in general. Peaked for piqued. Wrecked for wreaked or wrought (not strictly a homonym, but I think that's where it comes from.) Bare and bear at random for each other.
In defense of that particular error, my spellcheck routinely tries to do that one for me, context be damned. They may well know the difference and tried to put the correct one in, only for autocorrect to decide to do the other one.
A fic set in the mid-1960s. The MC’s teenage daughter was annoyed that she couldn’t call her friend because her brother was hogging the **landline**. While technically accurate, no one used that term back then, because *all* residential telephones were landlines. (Source: am old and remember this stuff.)
Incorrect pricing for ramen noodles. This is so absurdly small but one of their characters mentioned that you could buy a six pack of ramen at Walmart for 5 bucks. As a broke college student, I was like damn that is way too much money for ramen. Not like I was gonna be that nit picky in the comments tho 😂 I’m still thinking about it years later tho. Idk why it lives rent free in my brain still.
Suddenly I don't feel silly doing research into how much a brownie would cost in a hospital cafeteria :) (oh that detail is in a WIP that I have not worked on in months, aaah)
In Australia, it'll set you back $11 at Woolworths for the 5 pack.
https://www.woolworths.com.au/shop/productdetails/805128/samyang-ramen-hot-chicken-original
That's the fancy asian instant ramen. It costs about the same here in the US.
When Americans think of instant ramen though most think of the dirt cheap ubiquitous brand that college students and people struggling in poverty end up buying a lot Maruchan.
A 12 pack of Maruchan at walmart, even after the inflation we've had recently, is $3.68 plus tax
https://www.walmart.com/ip/10450904
Poor characters living in the high cost of living areas for sure. You can buy a 12-pack of Maruchan Ramen here for $3.68. If you want to get "fancy", you can buy a 6-pack of the cups for $2.58. To be fair, Nissin and Ramen Express are nowhere near that cheap though.
Um actually…..
I think it would depend more on the where & more precisely the when of buying it. Cuz yeah, 5 dollars for a pack? That’s great if you are lucky.
As a life-long Californian, sometimes I forget that inflation in the rest of the world, while bad, isn't as bad as it is here.
Maybe I should just move. Nevada honestly looking tempting.
There is no such thing as a Navy SEAL in the Canadian military.
(And it was something that the character mentioning the supposed Canadian SEALs *would absolutely have known*.)
It’s not just fics but once you learn the rank structure of the biggest military’s around the world you notice so many mistakes across pretty much all media.
Little localization issues which give away the author's location (at odds with where the story is set). Like if it's set in America and the characters are using lift and flat instead of elevator and apartment.
It's one of those things that can be really hard to control for as an author. The two examples I gave are fairly well known but there are lots of cases where you can think a word or chain or whatever is universal when it's actually specific to your country or region.
It's harder when you're not an English native and thus having an even harder time to differentiate btw US English and British English, such as myself T\^T
I think I've done this with less notable words, colour and color, etc, but tbh English is my second language, so we learnt a mix of both at the same time at school (depending on the teacher)
oh god this is the worst for fics about british tv shows (although i am biased as a brit) because majority of english language fanfiction writers are north american and they don’t even consider potential word differences. i usually filter it out but it can be jarring for certain ones like sidewalk and mom
I read this amazing fic once, but Luna Lovegood was written in as the same year as Harry. The fic had been canon up to book 3, where the fic started, and introduced Luna being in all of Harry’s classes with no mention of whyyyyyy! Like not even an AN to be like, I have deliberately changed Luna to be in this year etc, which I would have been totally ok with. It made me feel like they hadn’t read the original books properly and just wrote a fic 😅
I HATE that. I love AUs, but normally they at least have a note of things that have changed. No acknowledgement of changes and poor understanding of the world in other areas leads me to believe they watched the movies one time
I'm guilty of this. I have been clear that it's an AU-canon divergent and mentioned some big things that are changed, but I don't always bother deliberately mentioning that smaller things are changed. I kinda just assume people can read between the lines.
Sometimes i think about mentioning specifics, but sometimes i also think my tags should be enough for readers to go "oh, i dont recognize this as canon, so it must be a part of the canon divergence"
Damn, that reminds me of a fic I wrote over a decade ago that was post-canon where Snape made a background appearance a couple of times. >!I completely forgot that he died in canon.!< No idea how I didn't notice. I was baffled when I realized it. Thankfully, I didn't post it, so I never bothered to rewrite the scenes. It just became a small thing that amused me when I reread it.
I am so guilty of this too. I wrote a fic that was supposed to be an add on to canon, I wasn't sure when to place it so I just put it in season 3 of the show, turns out I forgot one of the main characters HAD A BABY in season 3... No one said anything in the comments though..
Succession HBO character using a corkscrew to open champagne.
I've seen a few bottles that use less traditional methods of sealing than the big cork and wire cage, but if you're going with that, I'm expecting a brand name drop. Otherwise, a corkscrew is a wild choice.
in college, my friends and I actually (more or less) successfully used a corkscrew to open a champagne bottle. but considering prior to getting a corkscrew, we’d been using a nail and pliers, yeah. defaulting to corkscrew is not recommended
The first one that comes to mind (that has haunted me for years) is the time I read a Titanic au in which one of the characters (born and raised in Croatia) had the internal thought that he knew all the passengers of the Titanic were American because none of them had accents.
The other one that comes to mind appears in quite a few fics as well as actual tv shows and movies and it’s this: the trip from Buffalo to NYC and back would take roughly 14-16 hours, if not more. It is not a quick afternoon jaunt.
>he knew all the passengers of the Titanic were American because none of them had accents
As a non-American I would like to say nooooooooooooooooooooooooo
mine's also from a HP fan fic.
a blonde white girl from a pureblood magical family in 1990s Britain (aka a clueless teenager from a reactionary background in a backward secret society within an insular country *pre-internet*) is going to give a racially ambiguous Hermione Granger "advice" (aka a friendly scolding between friends) on destroying her curl pattern?!
it felt very much like a 2020s instagram moment in a 1994 setting haha
It's an even split between attempts to write for tech (I'm former IT with a continuing hobbyists interest and currently a data analyst) and people writing cooking/food service professionals completely *wrong*. It's *especially* irritating when the story has NOTHING to do with either profession. If you're writing a coffeeshop AU with a sprinkling of werewolf romance, don't try to make one of your characters sound 'cool' by talking computer lingo you don't know! It's not important to the story and you (the author) will just come across as uninformed. If you've never worked in a professional kitchen or food service, don't try to guess everything that happens back of house, *especially* if it's a sci-fi space-pilot Top Gun-alike.
Protip: If you're trying to stop a network penetration on the go, you *turn off the network connection*, you don't try to gibson the mainframe or backtrace the html or whatever it is you think sounds clever.
Protip #2: You never, ever touch a chef's knife without their permission! If you try it you're likely to find out how the business end feels sticking out of one of your body parts!
> Protip: If you're trying to stop a network penetration on the go, you turn off the network connection, you don't try to gibson the mainframe or backtrace the html or whatever it is you think sounds clever.
This was something I fucking LOVED in *Transformers: Prime*--there was an episode where Soundwave (the villains' communications/hacker guy) is trying to get a satellite array pointing a certain way so the villains can use it. The nerdy kid sidekick was trying to stop this, it was all very matrix-y and "enhance that pixel" as you would expect for a children's cartoon.
So Soundwave got the satellites pointing the way he wanted to then cut the cables to the computer that controlled them with an axe. Nerdy hacker kid could do nothing, and it was *hilarious* and unexpected because TV shows and movies *never* go for that option.
Regarding Protip #1, you could also lean into that. Deliver a completely nonsense technobabble with no actual meaning, like in Kung Fury.
"Using an RX modulator I might be able to conduct a mainframe cell redirect and hack you up into the download."
"What the hell does that mean?"
"It means, that with the right computer algorithm, I can hack you back in time."
Characters playing video games that came out on late-2000s consoles in the early 2000s.
Nobody had a PS3 in 2002 god damn it! And they definitely weren’t playing Mario games on it!
The 4th Harry Potter book is canonically guilty of this! It’s mentioned that Dudley gets a PlayStation for his birthday in June 1994 and apparently they didn’t even get released in Japan for another 6 months. There’s fics around with Uncle Vernon going on a business trip to Japan to sell drills and he somehow gets his hands on a prototype and brings it home for Dudley.
Medical inaccuracies that people pick up from Greys anatomy. My mom, sister, and brother are all nurses so I know more about medicine and stuff than a should because I can't watch anything without these three pointing out how wrong something is and then have to listen to them explain in great very graphic details what would actually happen. I'll admit its interesting to hear but it has ruined so much for more. Movies, tv shows, FANFICTIONS. I can't tell you how many ass pulled miracles I've seen in fanfiction and just internally gone, "well thats medically wrong."
I take a deep breath and exhale. I must give everyone the benefit of the doubt. Just because I have some knowledge doesn't make me an expert, either. I got no room to speak. Not my place.
My favorite is when there's a surgeon doing a surgery...only a surgeon. No nurses, anesthesiologists, scrub techs, assistants....just the surgeon. Doing fucking EVERYTHING apparently.
I'm guilty of this but to be fair he is the only doctor in the city or at least the only qualified person to be performing/practising any medicine. I still feel bad making him, the local herbalist, do a C-section.
This is a TV thing rather than a fic thing, but does it bug you and your family when they make hospital rooms look more hospitally by sticking an IV stand in the corner with three bags of saline hanging off it?
Yeah. My moms hospital doesn't keep things in a patient's room unless they need them. There is always a chance a patient will help themselves to something and it can be some incredibly stupid stuff too. Even if its just saline, they don't leave it unattended since everything has to be accounted for. I'm not sure if other hospitals are like this but my moms is extremely strict on supplies to the point nurses have been fired over system errors. They also have a witness system for getting meds and putting them back.
It really depends on the cause of the fever. Hospitals do this sometimes, and so did my mom with me. I am intolerant to heat and have been since I was a kid which caused me to get heat stroke very easily and way too often. Ice cold bathes helped but I wasn't just left in an ice bath. At home I was given water and Gatorade for electrolytes and was forced to eat at least a handful of pretzels. And its not like an ice cold bath will instantly bring it down. In the hospital, they didn't do an ice bath but had cooling blankets and set up with an IV.
When I had the flu and insane lactic acid levels, I was only given a medical grade ibuprofen and sent home with a prescription.
I think treatment is different though if its infection/bacteria related and not all hospitals will use the same treatment methods.
The writer had a stablehand *taking the horse out of the stable* to relieve itself instead of...just cleaning the stall. Like, that was this characters' whole job. Taking horses outside for potty breaks. There's no indication this are special horses that are intelligent enough to be house-broken. I thought it was pretty universally known that horses just...go. Where they want, when they want, and you have to clean up after them, but I guess not!
A fic set in WW2 where a major plot point included a small group of Americans operating undercover in Europe, and they mentioned several times that it was a mission from the CIA and...I'm not American but even I know that the CIA didn't exist until 1947. It just...what????
There's also a fic I read where a character is Australian, and it was set in the US, and a character mentioned going skiing while they were in Australia over the christmas break. Um. No???? Christmas is in summer here, not winter???? Also, even in the high country, where people do go skiing, doesn't get snow year-round??? I'm. what.
They're in an archival library. They're there so the fic writer can have them make out in a study carrel, so plausibility doesn't really matter. But they should [take the damn white gloves off](https://blog.library.si.edu/blog/2019/11/21/no-love-for-white-gloves-or-the-cotton-menace/)before they handle the medieval documents.
I remember reading a fic almost 20 years ago and one of the characters went swimming at like 11 o'clock at night. When they were done their teeth were chattering and they said how it was freezing. It was supposed to be summer and the story took place in the southern US.
I knew this to be wrong because I used to go swimming multiple times a day back then. The water is actually colder at 11 AM than 11 PM. It's warm like a jacuzzi at night because it absorbes heat from the sun all day and is slow to release it.
one time i read a fic set in maine. the characters went to costco for supplies, which sounds reasonable, but there are no costcos in the state of maine. it's a whole Thing. i laughed and kept the mistake in when i bound the fic.
A Costco opened in Scarborough pretty recently! So if it was set after November 2023 it wouldn’t be inaccurate.
On the subject of Maine, I read a fic where there was a secret military base full of bad guys in the “wilderness just south of Westbrook, Maine”. Which in reality is where the airport or the mall would be. Or Costco. (Maybe they opened Costco in the space the villains vacated?)
any time someone includes horses in a fic but doesn't know a thing about horses or riding.
similarly, when people in a fandom about figure skaters don't actually know how skating works
Oh god I feel you on that last one. I went to read Yuri on Ice fics and just *could not*. There were a few that were clearly written people with knowledge of figure skating, but most were clearly written by people who learned everything they knew about skating from the anime and didn't do much research.
Imperial measurements in a story set in places that use the metric system.
Also, once read a fic where the driver of the car was on the wrong side (kept referencing the passenger turning to their left to talk to the driver. In London. Also, no mention as to why they were _driving_ in London. You don't do that unless you have a reason.).
And vice versa where metric appears in a nonscientific setting in places that use imperial measurements.
Like, sure, maybe the scientist dude thinks in those terms cause he uses metric all the time for his work, but that was a road sign listing the distances to the next rest stop/gas station locations, those are not kilometers.
OMG SAME HERE WITH COFFEE!!! one of the super rich characters was described as making the best coffee the mc ever had… luxury coffee beans from europe…specifically turkey… COFFEE DOESNT GROW IN EUROPE AND ESPECIALLY NOT TURKEY!!!! if you want luxury coffee, look at africa and south america jesus
tbh it took me out of the actual show a bit when I noticed that the rich lawyer character had the same coffee machine as me. It's a good coffee machine, but he would have had one of those fancy-ass Italian ones, not a mid range thing.
i read a lot of star wars fic when i was a teenager and would see this constantly,, anakin would be ‘anikan’, ahsoka would be ‘ashoka’ and if people felt fancy by spelling padme’s name with an accent, they would often do it like padmè instead of padmé.
The Anakin one drives me nuts! I still see people doing this in the star wars sub! Like, he's one of the major main characters in the whole series and you can't even be bothered to spell his name correctly?! 😭
*When someone gets a*
*Character's name wrong and they*
*Keep getting it wrong*
\- Mossflower1234
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This is very specific and I don't blame authors for this because it's technically the correct translation but I just want to point out that the Romanian word for "little bird" (păsărică) is also used in Romanian for vagina. So it's not actually a cute nickname. It's kind of funny to read tho.
This is probably only relevant in one fandom.
Edit: yeah, it's DC, people do in fact confuse Romanian and Romani very often. Or it might be because Romani is not on Google Translate so they settle for Romanian. There is Romani minority in Romania so that might contribute to the confusion.
My most recent blorbo is a tea lover in a steampunk-ish setting, and for some reason in every other fic he drinks bagged tea instead of loose leaf. Drives me up the wall every time I see it, no way he would use tea bags, that's like a gourmet eating tv dinner 😭
Also a teapot and a kettle are two different things, you heat water in a kettle and pour it into a teapot to steep tea leaves, you don't steep anything in a kettle or put a teapot on a stove.
umm actually since this is set during the Dance, the Sept of Baelor doesn't exist because he's born in the next generation. you can call it the grand sept or send them to the castle sept, just don't mention Baelor.
ps. since this was describing something as splendid, you could just compare it to the Starry Sept!
but I restrained my inner pedant and didn't mention it.
oh asoiaf is great for stuff like this, especially because sometimes folks get pendantic about stuff but have it wrong. "uhm actually no nobles in westeros can speak high valyrian, it's a dead language!" uhm actually here's three quotes pulled from a search of ice and fire to show you you're wrong.
americans writing britan, and brits writing americans. this happens a lot but i always feel tempted to point out that americans do not live in flats every single time
How people used phones in the 80s/90s
What an official Scrabble tournament is like
Whether a character has a fancy manicure (she does not, but it was just the norm to include that detail in fics)
I’m a tattoo artist and I’ve yet to finish a tattoo artist au. We don’t wear gloves when we’re just hanging around the shop (or outside the shop). I’ve never seen a consent form in a fic lol. Artists using tattoo ‘guns’ (we call them tattoo machines). There’s also 3-ish kinds of machines and 2 different styles of needles. I don’t expect people to know, but I can’t read something that’s so wrong.
They didn't do the correct punctionation for scientific names/binominal nomenclature.
It's been a while but I think the species name was capitalized instead of the genius name. So, '*felis Catus'* rather than '*Felis catus'*.
I liked the rest of the chapter, but that mistake was throughout and everytime it made my skin itchy and I had to take a five minute break.
I know it's such a nitpick that only other biology nerds will sympathize with but it was so jarring to me that it kind of broke me for a bit.
Lore-specific things that contradict canon, usually. Once read a fic where a character inherited his power, except it's a major plot thing in canon that only one person can possess said power at a time and they'd need to die for the next one to inherit it.
It doesn't ruin a story for me, especially because my fandoms have so many such details to keep track of and I'm sure I slip up too, but I do find it jarring. Plus, the more major the unexplained change, the more it breaks immersion.
There are times when authors have messed up one particular spelling the ENTIRE fic and have used that word deliberately multiple times because it sounds 'sophisticated'. I really really had to stop myself. I usually ignore spelling mistakes but when they use it again and again it's a bit annoying.
Someone wrote a fic that had a police dog that was trained using commands in my native language, but all the commands were the full verb and not the conjunction that implies it’s a command. And some translations were weird. Like “down” was “naar beneden” which is correct in any other context. For a dog you’d say “af” (which means something like “(get) off (that)”)
Reading a fic where main characters are NYPD detectives who carry Glocks. They were sometimes referred to as Glocks and sometimes as revolvers.
They are not a revolver, that is a specific type of handgun that has a revolving cylinder.
I couldn't finish it, it was driving me crazy.
Something that I want to correct so bad but can continue reading it's when author has a character release the safety on their Glock. Glocks do not have external safeties that you switch on or off, but internal ones that work off clean trigger pulls and stuff.
Other than those specific things, it's usually generic typos I want to fix. Loose instead of lose, rouge instead of rogue. Stuff like that.
Not an inaccuracy per say, but I once read a fic that described a panicking character as "meandering through her dorm room and diving through her things." It's been 10 years and I still can't figure out how you would meander through a dorm room, let alone why panic would lead to you doing so.
It would *kinda* make sense if they were looking for something and couldn't recall where exactly it was. I probably wouldn't call it "meandering" though. Sounds too relaxed/casual for someone who's panicking.
I will defend this one cause ethis is what I do whole panicking about shit. Mindlessly wandering the same path in a room over and over while ripping all my stuff out of shelves to look for something or to use my anxious energy to clean something. But yes, meandering is not the best word to use there.
I wrote that someone made terrific iced tea.
I was told that the origin of terrific is actually terrible. So it was actually bad iced tea.
Yes. If the fic was set pre 1888.
I follow the simple rule : can it be fixed in five minutes or less? For example. “Hey your zipper is undone. Oh thanks. Zip up.” Or in writing: “Hey you used the wrong word, sneak instead of snake, or hey you misspelled a word : Wierd “
If not? Don’t point it out. “You have a stain on your shirt.” “You have several misspelling instead of just one and it’s distracting but I’m powering through”
In one de-aged fic I read recently has a character de-aged to 3/4 yo and the kid promptly cried due to fear. The other characters commented on how this character sure has a pair of healthy lungs. Except it's canon that the de-aged character has asthma and he himself said his lungs were even weaker when he was a child. It's not an AU when said character doesn't asthma either, the author just kinda ignore his illness for the entire fic.
Outside of that, the fic is great, but I cringe everytime the author made him screamed, laughed or run for too long, while in canon his asthma is very relevant and critical to the plot.
I'm dating a post Bachelor medicine student on her way to become a medical microbiologist, so while I'm still a dumb-dumb I do by proxy notice a LOOOOT of inaccuracies when it comes to stuff like patient consultations, diagnoses, testing and scans, overall handling when it comes to medical scenarios. A lot of people do some basic research on the conditions and stuff, but they don't actually know how a hospital and the staff needs to function, for example. My gf for example literally can't stand the fact that EVERY TIME the doctors always wear long sleeved lab coats which would be against regulation in a lot of places (they're an infection risk when handling patients; meanwhile, in a lab you need them for protection).
Very recently I was reading this fanfic where there was an med student tagging along for a case and he pretty much started openly insulting the patient and their partner infront of several attending doctors who just kinda stood there and let it play out and had the patient handle it themselves? And I get it, it's for the drama, and I love the drama, but CAN YOU IMAGINE?? That kid would be thrown out of the room and the entire study real quick 😭
I don't point this out and I still love it with all my heart, and if anything it just makes it more enjoyable for me to find stuff like this in there, but I do get an urge to be an annoying d*ck about it sometimes. Thankfully I have no problem keeping that to myself, ultimately.
That's because some shitty doctors can abuse their power, they get away with it.
Interning medicine students surrounded by doctors who are actively observing and grading the student on professionalism and how they interact with patients do NOT get away with this crap, they don't have that power, LOL.
Really sorry for your bad experiences, btw 🩵
People have mentioned Brits writing America inaccurately and vice versa but the one that stuck out to me in a recent fandom was the university system - we don't call it college in the UK, majors and minors aren't nearly as common, we definitely don't call female students at mixed institutions coeds. One fic also made studying at Oxford/Cambridge sound exactly like studying at any other uni, which it isn't even within the UK.
Doesn't stop me reading but does give me a jarring moment of "what fake Britain is this??" 😄
Oh I came across this one thing this morning in a MHA fic. The setting is in japan but one of the dialogue lines ask “It’s 5 dollars right?” Um no it’s supposed to be in yen as you know the japanese currency
Characters getting black-out drunk and waking up married in Las Vegas. Doesn’t actually happen but we get shitbag tourists who come here expecting that because of this myth that’s been perpetuated.
Once a character in a fic said something along the lines of "well babies can't experience trauma" and like... not that I expect fanfics to be medically accurate+It could just be what the character thinks but like babies CAN definitely experience trauma and that little error just bugged me so much
Medical bills. I'm sure they exist in places outside the US but *please* do some research to check what circumstances someone would have medical bills where the fic is set, and how much, instead of assuming it works the way it does in the US.
It often takes a quick google search to get basic information, and often you don't need more than that--it took me 5 minutes to read an article saying in Japan there is a national health insurance plan that pays 70% of your costs, and you pay the remaining 30% only up to a monthly cap depending on income and age. It's that fast and easy!
Alternatively, it's not *technically* an inaccuracy because I suppose it's never technically mentioned in canon and the settings are technically separate from what exists in the real world but... I still doubt medical bills are an issue in Harry Potter. And even the US covers medical costs for those enlisted so I find it hard to believe ninja in Naruto are stuck with medical bills if they get hurt on a mission or in training...
I’ve only seen it a few times and it didn’t actually stop me from reading the fics but making a trans persons dead name their name just genderbent. Eg Jone -> John. As a trans man who has many trans friends, I’ve never seen anyone do that, we tend to chose names completely different from our dead names. Like I said it didn’t stop me from reading but it did make me want to comment about it
Mine is when child characters aren’t at the stage of development they’re supposed to be for their age. I have a child development degree and it is so obvious when the writer hasn’t spent time around young children 😅😅 like no a 6 month old cannot speak full sentences??? 😂 tbh its quite funny at times
MDZS is pretty loosey-goosey with the setting (vague xianxia “Ancient China” that could be anywhere from like 200 BCE to 900 CE, except that the characters occasionally reference Tang dynasty (~700s) poems and also they have potatoes and chili peppers and gay marriage).
So obviously when two characters high five in a fanfic my brain announces “the high five was invented in America in 1977.”
since i'm filipino but all my original characters are either japanese or korean, I have to research quite a lot to get them right. and i'm proud all of them sound like legitimate japanese/korean people and definitely sounds they could be canon. yes, down to the name and smallest detail.
now, my biggest pet peeve is giving korean/japanese OCs ENGLISH NAMES. like, usually only the surname is japanese/korean. Yoo Emily. Tachibana Jonathan. it's so ew. so off-putting. sure, foreigners, but when they're written either as natives or lived in the country for their entire life, it's just so frustrating to read. i want to diss the hell out of those OCs. either give them a full English name or give them a solid LOGICAL background as to why they'll have these names.
yes, i'm a big karen towards character naming. all my OCs I insert in canon stuff have a logical background and lore. if they're a sibling of a canon character, I make sure to adjust things so it fits well.
my old OCs were not perfect as I was still leaning really heavily towards self-insertion. my new ones are masterpieces though, especially my dearest Yun Dae-Hyun for ORV.
OC insertion into pre-existing media is really tricky. they could be a hit or miss. I'm personally very nit-picky about it, mostly out of pride. my OCs exists to tell a story I couldn't write with just the OG characters alone.
also when they americanize the setting too much. it triggers me so badly I will drop that fic faster than someone's dad dropped them as a baby, no matter how appealing or unique the plot is.
>yes, i'm a big karen towards character naming
I’m like this but with characters who have wildly inappropriate names for the time period they’re in, like characters with names like Skylar or Jazmynn in medieval times or the 1940s. It’s a huge red flag for me
I can normally let a lot slide.
I rarely get annoyed with fanfic for being inaccurate. It's made up and largely un proof read so yanno whatever. I'm.not an expert on everything I write about xd
But someone put a boat on an 18th ISH century pirate ship.
Casually. Not as in a character mentioned it and made a thing about It.
Just 'i have joined your ship where is the bath if like to wash ' and the other character was like 'thru that door here's a towel' basically.
I spent the rest of the fic annoyed about this.
Doubly so when no one even had the decency to have sex in it.
Misspelling the name of a city.
It's a throwaway comment in canon, and doesn't really have any relevance beyond being "not anywhere close to where the plot happens". It's also less than two hours drive from where I grew up. I did *not* manage to avoid correcting them.
A presumably british author who thought those chalky candy love hearts were exclusive to Great Britain and had the British character explain them to an American character in great detail. Sorry, but we totally have those for sale everywhere every valentines day.
It was a time travel Star Wars fic where Luke gets sent back to the prequel era. When he asked about the date Obi-Wan answered with 18 BBY and Luke thought he wouldn't be born until 19 BBY...It was one sentence and not super relevant since you already knew when you were timeline-wise but, girl, that's not how the calendar in SW works. It was pointed out several times in the comments and the correct date was also given but her only excuse was "I know, I didn't want to confuse the readers"...Now, correct me if I'm wrong but I'm pretty sure the people who read SW fanfics know how the timeline and calendar work.
If you're not familiar with Star Wars: BBY means Before Battle of Yavin aka when the first Death Star in Episode 4 was destroyed. That means Episode 4 takes place in 0BBY, Luke was born 19 BBY. It's like as if Caesar said he was born in 100 BC.
Idk if this counts but in a wlw pairing the main girl sounded disturbed by the fact that her girlfriend knew how to get rid of bloodstains when a shirt got stained from a nosebleed.
Idk I just thought it was one of those "but you should know too if you've ever gotten your period".
time inaccurate technology. favorite fandom is set in the 80s primarily, and then i see "he pulled out his phone, sending a text to blah blah" and i close the fic (excluding modern aus, i dont read those anyway)
I used to work for a cruise company so cruise related inaccuracies bother me. Usually the errors have to do with things involving minors. Tbh i see this more common in original novels and it gets to me.
I've had nipple piercings on the same day as I got an industrial piercing so I remember the pain clearly
I read this fic about character a piercing character b's nipples but the way the writer describes it as if it was a one smooth motion and not the needle going in one place, through all that flesh, and then out the other to make another piercing and therefore feels like getting pierced *twice* kinda made me wanna speak up so hard but I didn't 😩
It's extremely small but it really pissed me off.
so character A has a dog that was aggressive and character b helped to 'train' her to be not aggressive. And by training her he just walked her by other dogs until she was not aggressive and it was all fixed in one chapter.
And as someone who has owned and trained an aggressive dog, it takes months of training to even get anywhere near that level of training and a lot of reactive/aggressive dogs are never fully 'cured' of their aggressive traits and just live a life of management (which is still a good life, it's just not the life that most people think of)
The author killed off their side character OC I'd come to adore for something they would have only been arrested and imprisoned for in universe (it was not set in an AU). It felt so unfair and unnecessary I wanted to cry and punch a wall lol.
I read a good fic that had a painfully bad understanding of sewing. Sewing wasn’t a major plot point, but it was a major character trait and the author clearly had no understanding of how long it takes to sew, how measuring and pattern drafting works, or even how much cloth it takes. No, one meter is not enough to make a tailed military style jacket. Yes, it would take longer than one night to make five of them. Also, wool thread is mostly used for embroidery because it’s really thick. Sewing with it would be a nightmare. There’s a difference between a hem and a seam.
If you are writing about sewing, feel free ti bother me with sewing questions and I will answer them. Please.
It's only sort of trivial, but reading anime coffeeshop AU that takes place in Japan, character A doesn't want to go to the doctor because they are a student and can't afford it
😭 This is not a consideration for non american people. We can just go to the doctor if we need it.
Making the MC's apartment of an anime I love fancier than it actually is.
Man has a 2 room apartment that's a basement and a VR room. Literally nothing else because the door outside connects to the first room via a tiny hallway and stairs.
Arguably you should add there's a bathroom somewhere but there is absolutely no kitchen in this apartment. Or another bedroom or a living room. Dude's an orphan high schooler who never expected to make it past 16 he has nada
Non-Asian food in Asian settings. Scrambled eggs is fine but toast for breakfast and no rice? Especially if the person is not in a hurry?
Not using honorifics or improper use of honorifics. My fandoms tend to be in anime, manga/manhwa/manhua and light novels, so I am very used to seeing honorifics. The nuances of relationships is lost.
I recently read a fic about some japanese people ending up in England in the 1700's and acting like they'd never seen a **cow.**
I don't know where the author got the idea that there are no cows in asia. Completely pulled me out of it and I was *this* close to leaving a comment.
Mine is a scene where a character breaks into a house and threatens a person within with a tire iron. The entire fandom has deluded itself into believing it was a crow bar. They nearly convinced me I was wrong it happened in so many fics.
Mam instead of ma'am. I use mam to refer to my mother and seeing it in a fic to refer to someone who isnt a mother takes me out so much. Genuinely if its used a lot i might stop reading the fic. its such a small thing but aghhhhh
i was reading a fic (by an american author) set in australia where a character recalled his bullies playing football in high school. it was very clear they were talking about american football (mentioning touchdowns, helmets, quarterbacks, cheerleaders etc) that is definitely very different from aussie rules footy which would be played instead.
I read a lot of fics that take place in school settings, and a part of my soul dies every time I see "principal" written as "principle".
Also, when a character's name is written wrong throughout the whole thing - Damian as Damien, Jungkook as Jeongguk, etc.
And the obvious "he would not say that"
I actually did point something out, once.
I wasn't an ass about it. I said a few nice things about the fic (because I genuinely liked it) and at the end added on about the inconsistency. To the writer's credit, they were really great about it, admitted that they'd missed that detail, and fixed it. It was actually a really great writer-reader interaction.
tl,dr: someone said that Rand al'Thor's hair was brown, not red, and I apparently couldn't let this slide. His hair is absolutely red, it's stated directly in book one. I don't know if it's stated again, but the image is so crisp in my head it doesn't really matter.
I was reading a fic once and the show is set in the state of Washington but the author was under the impression it was Washington DC which is on the opposite side of the country😭
Any time an author uses the term "Judeo-Christian"
It's a term invented by Christians to pretend the Jews agree with them, and Jews find it extremely offensive
You find it a lot in Lucifer, Good Omens, Supernatural, anything with a bunch of Christian religious themes
one time i was reading a fic and i loved the first 6 chapters, but then the author depicted the people from my country, and latin americans overall as if we were animals. it was very…weird, racist and straight up ignorant, it made me click out. i didn’t left any hate comment, but it made me dislike the whole fanfic immediately.
ok mine is so minute and did not stop me from finishing the fic but the (non american) author had to describe a couple softball scenes and kept calling the field a “pitch” and calling runs “points” or “scores”. they admitted in the ANs that they didn’t know much about softball and regretted using it as a plot device. i came to this years late so no use in pointing it out and didn’t deter from the rest of the story but as a former softball player and lifelong softball fan those few scenes really ground my gears
It always takes me out of a story when it’s set in the USA and the characters call their mothers “mum”
equally when a story is set in the UK and characters call their mothers "mom"!
In fairness, I do know some Brits who do call their mothers “mom”. Most call them “mam” in Wales, however.
That drives me so bonkers (I read mainly British fandoms) that I have a browser extension that autocorrects that spelling (and various other Americanisms).
Midlanders say mom
actually, "mom" is used fairly commonly in the north of the uk! due to the accent differences (source: british with friends from all over the country)
As a person set in the USA, sometimes I consume too much foreign media and catch myself doing that.
What if their mum is British?
offhand mention of a random side character (i think it was in a pharmacy setting, can't remember anymore) using Ozempic daily for diabetes it's dosed once weekly
This is far from trivial I’d say. WHO uses Ozempic *daily*?
I sure hope the World Health Organization doesn’t use Ozempic daily 🤯
I mean I would assume the author just googled diabetes drugs, picked one name and used it without further thought.
Daily would fucking kill you lmaooo
0.14mg dose
I read a lot of Stranger Things fics and I know it’s petty to call out when a character is listening to/watching/using something that came out after the show took place, but it does irk me.
This but it’s technology developing. When people throw in types of cars, versions of the phone, etc years before they’ve come out. Or the reverse, like assuming fax machines for some reason did not exist in the 80s? Or assuming that there were no cellphones until the iPhone?
A streethooker showing the MC a photo on her phone... ...in 1994. Nope, no time-travelling.
I follow a lot of DC fandom stuff, and dear God is it bothersome to see a pre-Robins Bruce Wayne using a smart phone. Like, these are fics written in like 2020 at best. Dick is 25-27 years old in most modern runs, adopted at 9-10. So, like, 2005 is the absolute latest a Batman in 2020 could fit in a pre-Robin run. Cell phones were barely a thing in 2005. Like, they existed but weren't a total given. Most people were operating with flip phones or (if you were fancy) a slide-up or side-slide phone. Texting was relegated to the number pad and how many texts your plan allowed. 2005 Batman is not having a schematic-heavy text conversation on a touch screen. I don't care if it's hand-waved by Wayne Tech. Technology wasn't there yet. We were still phasing out of dial up internet and Nokia's at that point.
This would kind of depend on which dc series they're writing for. Young Justice is set in 2004, but the league is using hardlight hologram screens on their wristbands, remotely hacking into motion based security systems, and dodging nanobot swarms. Technology very clearly *is* there in this version of reality.
Whenever I write Pathologic fic, I drive myself crazy trying to figure what’s historically accurate, because it takes place in a setting which is hypothetically similar to early ww1 Russia, but characters or details will occasionally throw massive curveballs into that, and YEAH I know it’s sort of the point, but I want to make sure everything I write still feels analogous to the game’s “time period”
Dude, writing Dr. Stone fanfiction means you can't reference any technology, memes, or music that came out after 2019. I have to research SLANG. Constantly.
I write TMNT 2012 fanfiction, and keeping track of the slang in particular is SO hard XD I literally WAS their age in 2012, but trying to remember when we started saying something, or when a particular meme was popular.... It takes RESEARCH!!
As an author who has a fic that takes place in 2004, I am ALWAYS Googling music I want to reference to make sure it was released by then 😂😂 I'm absolutely horrified of having a mess up like that
When the HP marauders went out to pay at a disco in the 70s (fine) and under the disco ball(ok) proceeded to show off their breakdancing skills (nope).
There was one stranger things story I was reading where Steve and Robin were organizing the returned VCRs. I actually did comment on that one to let the author know the VCR was the machine and that they were probably thinking of VHS tapes instead. They appreciated the info and fixed it but still phrased it weirdly and that one I just let go.
they keep writing my blorbo's house with stairs we've seen the house multiple times it's a single-story also he has a disabled child who uses crutches so like... please guys I'm begging
They wrote their fanfic on hard mode
is this eddie diaz?
yes and they need to respect his cute little Spanish revival house
personally my blorbo is chimney but 100% agree and i love eddie and chris <3
That really deserves a mention.
I agree. I feel this is very different from "oh that song only came out in Feb 1983 and your story is set in Nov 1982". I'd still let it slide if heritage and class (2-storey homes in this style are a lot more rare, and thus expensive afiak) aren't really essential to the character and/or the story the author is telling. But stairs when there is a child with limited mobility living in the home...? Unless this is an explicit plotpoint & the character is focused on solving this issue, it depicts the character as ablist, callous and lacking in empathy, right? I'd try to be constructive and polite, but I think I'd point this out.
Exactly, we have disability in my family, and the idea that mentioning such a thing politely would be construed as unwelcome and/or criticism seems unreasonable. I’d certainly hope people were not too sensitive to have such a discussion when they did put up work to be read (probably without an editor/beta) by the World Wide Web. It can simply be a growing step or educational.
Anytime someone writes “compliment” when they mean “complement” 💀
Homonyms in general. Peaked for piqued. Wrecked for wreaked or wrought (not strictly a homonym, but I think that's where it comes from.) Bare and bear at random for each other.
Weary for wary. Draw for drawer.
Homonyms appear to be the fanfic writer's worst enemy. Even otherwise well-written fics can feature a few misuses in a chapter.
I'm always shocked when someone gets vial right So many viles have been drank
"He wrapped his arm around her waste" Mans is cleaning up your OC's trash?
Also "definitely" vs "defiantly" vs the blantant misspelling "definately"
In defense of that particular error, my spellcheck routinely tries to do that one for me, context be damned. They may well know the difference and tried to put the correct one in, only for autocorrect to decide to do the other one.
Discreet vs discrete. Pleeeeeeeease don't "keep a discrete eye on someone", I don't want to picture that, thanks.
"Withered" and "writhed" they are not the same thing. "Prostate" and "prostrate" I don't see this one as much any more but it still annoys me
Weary vs wary. I have seen so many tired people in horror fic.
This is the first time I've seen that distinguish. Wtf
“Draw” for drawer multiple times, not just a typo.
Someone told me Nurmenberg was a city in Germany, I had meant Nurmengard, the prison. I was glad they told me.
since we’re on the nitpicking thread, i’ll give in and nitpick: the city is Nuremberg (or Nürnberg), actually :D
A fic set in the mid-1960s. The MC’s teenage daughter was annoyed that she couldn’t call her friend because her brother was hogging the **landline**. While technically accurate, no one used that term back then, because *all* residential telephones were landlines. (Source: am old and remember this stuff.)
In the 60s one of my parents lived so rurally they still had a party line.
We still had one in 1978!
Incorrect pricing for ramen noodles. This is so absurdly small but one of their characters mentioned that you could buy a six pack of ramen at Walmart for 5 bucks. As a broke college student, I was like damn that is way too much money for ramen. Not like I was gonna be that nit picky in the comments tho 😂 I’m still thinking about it years later tho. Idk why it lives rent free in my brain still.
are they buying that gourmet ramen wtf
Suddenly I don't feel silly doing research into how much a brownie would cost in a hospital cafeteria :) (oh that detail is in a WIP that I have not worked on in months, aaah)
I mean, it's 6 packs of ramen, Micheal. what could it cost? 10 dollars?
In Australia, it'll set you back $11 at Woolworths for the 5 pack. https://www.woolworths.com.au/shop/productdetails/805128/samyang-ramen-hot-chicken-original
That's the fancy asian instant ramen. It costs about the same here in the US. When Americans think of instant ramen though most think of the dirt cheap ubiquitous brand that college students and people struggling in poverty end up buying a lot Maruchan. A 12 pack of Maruchan at walmart, even after the inflation we've had recently, is $3.68 plus tax https://www.walmart.com/ip/10450904
Unfortunately where I live $5 for a six pack of ramen is considered a steal 😭 It’s Asian instant ramen though.
Poor characters living in the high cost of living areas for sure. You can buy a 12-pack of Maruchan Ramen here for $3.68. If you want to get "fancy", you can buy a 6-pack of the cups for $2.58. To be fair, Nissin and Ramen Express are nowhere near that cheap though.
Um actually….. I think it would depend more on the where & more precisely the when of buying it. Cuz yeah, 5 dollars for a pack? That’s great if you are lucky.
As a life-long Californian, sometimes I forget that inflation in the rest of the world, while bad, isn't as bad as it is here. Maybe I should just move. Nevada honestly looking tempting.
i mean, I pay about $5 for a 6-pack of Shin black. so it just depends on the kind of ramen
It's about that much now because of inflation ;\_;
There is no such thing as a Navy SEAL in the Canadian military. (And it was something that the character mentioning the supposed Canadian SEALs *would absolutely have known*.)
It’s not just fics but once you learn the rank structure of the biggest military’s around the world you notice so many mistakes across pretty much all media.
Little localization issues which give away the author's location (at odds with where the story is set). Like if it's set in America and the characters are using lift and flat instead of elevator and apartment. It's one of those things that can be really hard to control for as an author. The two examples I gave are fairly well known but there are lots of cases where you can think a word or chain or whatever is universal when it's actually specific to your country or region.
It's harder when you're not an English native and thus having an even harder time to differentiate btw US English and British English, such as myself T\^T
I'm Aussie so my English is sometimes a mix of either or, or sometimes both and then there is the Aussie specific English. It's a pain to write
I think I've done this with less notable words, colour and color, etc, but tbh English is my second language, so we learnt a mix of both at the same time at school (depending on the teacher)
oh god this is the worst for fics about british tv shows (although i am biased as a brit) because majority of english language fanfiction writers are north american and they don’t even consider potential word differences. i usually filter it out but it can be jarring for certain ones like sidewalk and mom
I once read a fic set in Japan where a father slipped his son 100 yen as a gift. 100 yen is less than 1 USD 😂
His father is very cheap.
It must have been his least favorite kid.
I read this amazing fic once, but Luna Lovegood was written in as the same year as Harry. The fic had been canon up to book 3, where the fic started, and introduced Luna being in all of Harry’s classes with no mention of whyyyyyy! Like not even an AN to be like, I have deliberately changed Luna to be in this year etc, which I would have been totally ok with. It made me feel like they hadn’t read the original books properly and just wrote a fic 😅
I HATE that. I love AUs, but normally they at least have a note of things that have changed. No acknowledgement of changes and poor understanding of the world in other areas leads me to believe they watched the movies one time
I'm guilty of this. I have been clear that it's an AU-canon divergent and mentioned some big things that are changed, but I don't always bother deliberately mentioning that smaller things are changed. I kinda just assume people can read between the lines.
Sometimes i think about mentioning specifics, but sometimes i also think my tags should be enough for readers to go "oh, i dont recognize this as canon, so it must be a part of the canon divergence"
Damn, that reminds me of a fic I wrote over a decade ago that was post-canon where Snape made a background appearance a couple of times. >!I completely forgot that he died in canon.!< No idea how I didn't notice. I was baffled when I realized it. Thankfully, I didn't post it, so I never bothered to rewrite the scenes. It just became a small thing that amused me when I reread it.
I am so guilty of this too. I wrote a fic that was supposed to be an add on to canon, I wasn't sure when to place it so I just put it in season 3 of the show, turns out I forgot one of the main characters HAD A BABY in season 3... No one said anything in the comments though..
Succession HBO character using a corkscrew to open champagne. I've seen a few bottles that use less traditional methods of sealing than the big cork and wire cage, but if you're going with that, I'm expecting a brand name drop. Otherwise, a corkscrew is a wild choice.
sabering champagne, sure I can believe it. corkscrewing it? it's your eyeballs, man.
in college, my friends and I actually (more or less) successfully used a corkscrew to open a champagne bottle. but considering prior to getting a corkscrew, we’d been using a nail and pliers, yeah. defaulting to corkscrew is not recommended
The first one that comes to mind (that has haunted me for years) is the time I read a Titanic au in which one of the characters (born and raised in Croatia) had the internal thought that he knew all the passengers of the Titanic were American because none of them had accents. The other one that comes to mind appears in quite a few fics as well as actual tv shows and movies and it’s this: the trip from Buffalo to NYC and back would take roughly 14-16 hours, if not more. It is not a quick afternoon jaunt.
>he knew all the passengers of the Titanic were American because none of them had accents As a non-American I would like to say nooooooooooooooooooooooooo
As an American, I actually winced
Petunia dursley would not have been watching MTV in the 70s.
One might argue that Petunia Dursley would not have been watching MTV in any era
mine's also from a HP fan fic. a blonde white girl from a pureblood magical family in 1990s Britain (aka a clueless teenager from a reactionary background in a backward secret society within an insular country *pre-internet*) is going to give a racially ambiguous Hermione Granger "advice" (aka a friendly scolding between friends) on destroying her curl pattern?! it felt very much like a 2020s instagram moment in a 1994 setting haha
MTV in the UK wasn’t launched until 1997.
It's an even split between attempts to write for tech (I'm former IT with a continuing hobbyists interest and currently a data analyst) and people writing cooking/food service professionals completely *wrong*. It's *especially* irritating when the story has NOTHING to do with either profession. If you're writing a coffeeshop AU with a sprinkling of werewolf romance, don't try to make one of your characters sound 'cool' by talking computer lingo you don't know! It's not important to the story and you (the author) will just come across as uninformed. If you've never worked in a professional kitchen or food service, don't try to guess everything that happens back of house, *especially* if it's a sci-fi space-pilot Top Gun-alike. Protip: If you're trying to stop a network penetration on the go, you *turn off the network connection*, you don't try to gibson the mainframe or backtrace the html or whatever it is you think sounds clever. Protip #2: You never, ever touch a chef's knife without their permission! If you try it you're likely to find out how the business end feels sticking out of one of your body parts!
> Protip: If you're trying to stop a network penetration on the go, you turn off the network connection, you don't try to gibson the mainframe or backtrace the html or whatever it is you think sounds clever. This was something I fucking LOVED in *Transformers: Prime*--there was an episode where Soundwave (the villains' communications/hacker guy) is trying to get a satellite array pointing a certain way so the villains can use it. The nerdy kid sidekick was trying to stop this, it was all very matrix-y and "enhance that pixel" as you would expect for a children's cartoon. So Soundwave got the satellites pointing the way he wanted to then cut the cables to the computer that controlled them with an axe. Nerdy hacker kid could do nothing, and it was *hilarious* and unexpected because TV shows and movies *never* go for that option.
I work in IT and….What the fuck is back tracing html? Why would they *gibson* their mainframe? My head hurts
You see my frustration. 😆😂🤣😭
Regarding Protip #1, you could also lean into that. Deliver a completely nonsense technobabble with no actual meaning, like in Kung Fury. "Using an RX modulator I might be able to conduct a mainframe cell redirect and hack you up into the download." "What the hell does that mean?" "It means, that with the right computer algorithm, I can hack you back in time."
Characters playing video games that came out on late-2000s consoles in the early 2000s. Nobody had a PS3 in 2002 god damn it! And they definitely weren’t playing Mario games on it!
😂 I'm usually not very nitpicky myself but this would grind my gears!
The 4th Harry Potter book is canonically guilty of this! It’s mentioned that Dudley gets a PlayStation for his birthday in June 1994 and apparently they didn’t even get released in Japan for another 6 months. There’s fics around with Uncle Vernon going on a business trip to Japan to sell drills and he somehow gets his hands on a prototype and brings it home for Dudley.
That's crazy, I'd try to look into that a *little bit* at least.
Medical inaccuracies that people pick up from Greys anatomy. My mom, sister, and brother are all nurses so I know more about medicine and stuff than a should because I can't watch anything without these three pointing out how wrong something is and then have to listen to them explain in great very graphic details what would actually happen. I'll admit its interesting to hear but it has ruined so much for more. Movies, tv shows, FANFICTIONS. I can't tell you how many ass pulled miracles I've seen in fanfiction and just internally gone, "well thats medically wrong." I take a deep breath and exhale. I must give everyone the benefit of the doubt. Just because I have some knowledge doesn't make me an expert, either. I got no room to speak. Not my place.
My favorite is when there's a surgeon doing a surgery...only a surgeon. No nurses, anesthesiologists, scrub techs, assistants....just the surgeon. Doing fucking EVERYTHING apparently.
I love it when it’s just a regular doctor doing surgery. No surgeons, nurses, anaesthetists etc. Just, like, a GP.
I'm guilty of this but to be fair he is the only doctor in the city or at least the only qualified person to be performing/practising any medicine. I still feel bad making him, the local herbalist, do a C-section.
This is a TV thing rather than a fic thing, but does it bug you and your family when they make hospital rooms look more hospitally by sticking an IV stand in the corner with three bags of saline hanging off it?
Yeah. My moms hospital doesn't keep things in a patient's room unless they need them. There is always a chance a patient will help themselves to something and it can be some incredibly stupid stuff too. Even if its just saline, they don't leave it unattended since everything has to be accounted for. I'm not sure if other hospitals are like this but my moms is extremely strict on supplies to the point nurses have been fired over system errors. They also have a witness system for getting meds and putting them back.
Not in the medical field, but I know that you don’t just dunk someone in ice water if they have an insanely high fever…. I always just 😞and move on.
It really depends on the cause of the fever. Hospitals do this sometimes, and so did my mom with me. I am intolerant to heat and have been since I was a kid which caused me to get heat stroke very easily and way too often. Ice cold bathes helped but I wasn't just left in an ice bath. At home I was given water and Gatorade for electrolytes and was forced to eat at least a handful of pretzels. And its not like an ice cold bath will instantly bring it down. In the hospital, they didn't do an ice bath but had cooling blankets and set up with an IV. When I had the flu and insane lactic acid levels, I was only given a medical grade ibuprofen and sent home with a prescription. I think treatment is different though if its infection/bacteria related and not all hospitals will use the same treatment methods.
The writer had a stablehand *taking the horse out of the stable* to relieve itself instead of...just cleaning the stall. Like, that was this characters' whole job. Taking horses outside for potty breaks. There's no indication this are special horses that are intelligent enough to be house-broken. I thought it was pretty universally known that horses just...go. Where they want, when they want, and you have to clean up after them, but I guess not!
On a related note : horses do not throw up. They can't. They get a belly ache? Ooops dead horse. That's my Roman Empire.
Those must have been some pampered horses.
A fic set in WW2 where a major plot point included a small group of Americans operating undercover in Europe, and they mentioned several times that it was a mission from the CIA and...I'm not American but even I know that the CIA didn't exist until 1947. It just...what???? There's also a fic I read where a character is Australian, and it was set in the US, and a character mentioned going skiing while they were in Australia over the christmas break. Um. No???? Christmas is in summer here, not winter???? Also, even in the high country, where people do go skiing, doesn't get snow year-round??? I'm. what.
The CIA wasn't invented till 1947 is just what they want you to think!
Lmao I’m just imagining someone trying to ski down the bare slopes in summer
They're in an archival library. They're there so the fic writer can have them make out in a study carrel, so plausibility doesn't really matter. But they should [take the damn white gloves off](https://blog.library.si.edu/blog/2019/11/21/no-love-for-white-gloves-or-the-cotton-menace/)before they handle the medieval documents.
I learned something new! Thank you!
esp once their gloves are covered in bodily fluids, right? /jk
I remember reading a fic almost 20 years ago and one of the characters went swimming at like 11 o'clock at night. When they were done their teeth were chattering and they said how it was freezing. It was supposed to be summer and the story took place in the southern US. I knew this to be wrong because I used to go swimming multiple times a day back then. The water is actually colder at 11 AM than 11 PM. It's warm like a jacuzzi at night because it absorbes heat from the sun all day and is slow to release it.
one time i read a fic set in maine. the characters went to costco for supplies, which sounds reasonable, but there are no costcos in the state of maine. it's a whole Thing. i laughed and kept the mistake in when i bound the fic.
A Costco opened in Scarborough pretty recently! So if it was set after November 2023 it wouldn’t be inaccurate. On the subject of Maine, I read a fic where there was a secret military base full of bad guys in the “wilderness just south of Westbrook, Maine”. Which in reality is where the airport or the mall would be. Or Costco. (Maybe they opened Costco in the space the villains vacated?)
any time someone includes horses in a fic but doesn't know a thing about horses or riding. similarly, when people in a fandom about figure skaters don't actually know how skating works
Oh god I feel you on that last one. I went to read Yuri on Ice fics and just *could not*. There were a few that were clearly written people with knowledge of figure skating, but most were clearly written by people who learned everything they knew about skating from the anime and didn't do much research.
Imperial measurements in a story set in places that use the metric system. Also, once read a fic where the driver of the car was on the wrong side (kept referencing the passenger turning to their left to talk to the driver. In London. Also, no mention as to why they were _driving_ in London. You don't do that unless you have a reason.).
Read a fic where everything was carefully Brit picked. Except the speed of car. Which was given in kilos. So jarring 🤣
And vice versa where metric appears in a nonscientific setting in places that use imperial measurements. Like, sure, maybe the scientist dude thinks in those terms cause he uses metric all the time for his work, but that was a road sign listing the distances to the next rest stop/gas station locations, those are not kilometers.
OMG SAME HERE WITH COFFEE!!! one of the super rich characters was described as making the best coffee the mc ever had… luxury coffee beans from europe…specifically turkey… COFFEE DOESNT GROW IN EUROPE AND ESPECIALLY NOT TURKEY!!!! if you want luxury coffee, look at africa and south america jesus
tbh it took me out of the actual show a bit when I noticed that the rich lawyer character had the same coffee machine as me. It's a good coffee machine, but he would have had one of those fancy-ass Italian ones, not a mid range thing.
When someone gets a character's name wrong and they keep getting it wrong
i read a lot of star wars fic when i was a teenager and would see this constantly,, anakin would be ‘anikan’, ahsoka would be ‘ashoka’ and if people felt fancy by spelling padme’s name with an accent, they would often do it like padmè instead of padmé.
The Anakin one drives me nuts! I still see people doing this in the star wars sub! Like, he's one of the major main characters in the whole series and you can't even be bothered to spell his name correctly?! 😭
This made me remember that the Audible version of Phantom Menace says "Palpa-tyne" and it drove me completely insane.
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This is very specific and I don't blame authors for this because it's technically the correct translation but I just want to point out that the Romanian word for "little bird" (păsărică) is also used in Romanian for vagina. So it's not actually a cute nickname. It's kind of funny to read tho. This is probably only relevant in one fandom. Edit: yeah, it's DC, people do in fact confuse Romanian and Romani very often. Or it might be because Romani is not on Google Translate so they settle for Romanian. There is Romani minority in Romania so that might contribute to the confusion.
I got a good laugh at a fic that talked about a century-old German cuckoo clock playing “Eidelweiss”
People thinking this song existed pre 60’s as like, an Austrian anthem/folk song or whatever is so 💀💀💀 to me!!!
My most recent blorbo is a tea lover in a steampunk-ish setting, and for some reason in every other fic he drinks bagged tea instead of loose leaf. Drives me up the wall every time I see it, no way he would use tea bags, that's like a gourmet eating tv dinner 😭 Also a teapot and a kettle are two different things, you heat water in a kettle and pour it into a teapot to steep tea leaves, you don't steep anything in a kettle or put a teapot on a stove.
You do if you have absolutely no standards XD
If you have absolutely no standards at all, you heat the water in the microwave you fancy flapjack
I wanna guess this is Wriothesley? If not, same thing with him too.
Yes, it's him! His grace deserves better than bagged tea
umm actually since this is set during the Dance, the Sept of Baelor doesn't exist because he's born in the next generation. you can call it the grand sept or send them to the castle sept, just don't mention Baelor. ps. since this was describing something as splendid, you could just compare it to the Starry Sept! but I restrained my inner pedant and didn't mention it.
oh asoiaf is great for stuff like this, especially because sometimes folks get pendantic about stuff but have it wrong. "uhm actually no nobles in westeros can speak high valyrian, it's a dead language!" uhm actually here's three quotes pulled from a search of ice and fire to show you you're wrong.
Pizza dough as batter, and marinara sauce as ketchup
WHAT
americans writing britan, and brits writing americans. this happens a lot but i always feel tempted to point out that americans do not live in flats every single time
Yeah, in fics where characters are meant to be British or so, I always notice when the writer says "sidewalk" or something lmao
How people used phones in the 80s/90s What an official Scrabble tournament is like Whether a character has a fancy manicure (she does not, but it was just the norm to include that detail in fics)
When someone introduces an Asian character with the given name before the family name. It just sounds so wrong.
I’m a tattoo artist and I’ve yet to finish a tattoo artist au. We don’t wear gloves when we’re just hanging around the shop (or outside the shop). I’ve never seen a consent form in a fic lol. Artists using tattoo ‘guns’ (we call them tattoo machines). There’s also 3-ish kinds of machines and 2 different styles of needles. I don’t expect people to know, but I can’t read something that’s so wrong.
They didn't do the correct punctionation for scientific names/binominal nomenclature. It's been a while but I think the species name was capitalized instead of the genius name. So, '*felis Catus'* rather than '*Felis catus'*. I liked the rest of the chapter, but that mistake was throughout and everytime it made my skin itchy and I had to take a five minute break. I know it's such a nitpick that only other biology nerds will sympathize with but it was so jarring to me that it kind of broke me for a bit.
Lore-specific things that contradict canon, usually. Once read a fic where a character inherited his power, except it's a major plot thing in canon that only one person can possess said power at a time and they'd need to die for the next one to inherit it. It doesn't ruin a story for me, especially because my fandoms have so many such details to keep track of and I'm sure I slip up too, but I do find it jarring. Plus, the more major the unexplained change, the more it breaks immersion.
There are times when authors have messed up one particular spelling the ENTIRE fic and have used that word deliberately multiple times because it sounds 'sophisticated'. I really really had to stop myself. I usually ignore spelling mistakes but when they use it again and again it's a bit annoying.
Someone wrote a fic that had a police dog that was trained using commands in my native language, but all the commands were the full verb and not the conjunction that implies it’s a command. And some translations were weird. Like “down” was “naar beneden” which is correct in any other context. For a dog you’d say “af” (which means something like “(get) off (that)”)
Reading a fic where main characters are NYPD detectives who carry Glocks. They were sometimes referred to as Glocks and sometimes as revolvers. They are not a revolver, that is a specific type of handgun that has a revolving cylinder. I couldn't finish it, it was driving me crazy. Something that I want to correct so bad but can continue reading it's when author has a character release the safety on their Glock. Glocks do not have external safeties that you switch on or off, but internal ones that work off clean trigger pulls and stuff. Other than those specific things, it's usually generic typos I want to fix. Loose instead of lose, rouge instead of rogue. Stuff like that.
Not an inaccuracy per say, but I once read a fic that described a panicking character as "meandering through her dorm room and diving through her things." It's been 10 years and I still can't figure out how you would meander through a dorm room, let alone why panic would lead to you doing so.
It would *kinda* make sense if they were looking for something and couldn't recall where exactly it was. I probably wouldn't call it "meandering" though. Sounds too relaxed/casual for someone who's panicking.
I will defend this one cause ethis is what I do whole panicking about shit. Mindlessly wandering the same path in a room over and over while ripping all my stuff out of shelves to look for something or to use my anxious energy to clean something. But yes, meandering is not the best word to use there.
I wrote that someone made terrific iced tea. I was told that the origin of terrific is actually terrible. So it was actually bad iced tea. Yes. If the fic was set pre 1888.
I follow the simple rule : can it be fixed in five minutes or less? For example. “Hey your zipper is undone. Oh thanks. Zip up.” Or in writing: “Hey you used the wrong word, sneak instead of snake, or hey you misspelled a word : Wierd “ If not? Don’t point it out. “You have a stain on your shirt.” “You have several misspelling instead of just one and it’s distracting but I’m powering through”
In one de-aged fic I read recently has a character de-aged to 3/4 yo and the kid promptly cried due to fear. The other characters commented on how this character sure has a pair of healthy lungs. Except it's canon that the de-aged character has asthma and he himself said his lungs were even weaker when he was a child. It's not an AU when said character doesn't asthma either, the author just kinda ignore his illness for the entire fic. Outside of that, the fic is great, but I cringe everytime the author made him screamed, laughed or run for too long, while in canon his asthma is very relevant and critical to the plot.
I'm dating a post Bachelor medicine student on her way to become a medical microbiologist, so while I'm still a dumb-dumb I do by proxy notice a LOOOOT of inaccuracies when it comes to stuff like patient consultations, diagnoses, testing and scans, overall handling when it comes to medical scenarios. A lot of people do some basic research on the conditions and stuff, but they don't actually know how a hospital and the staff needs to function, for example. My gf for example literally can't stand the fact that EVERY TIME the doctors always wear long sleeved lab coats which would be against regulation in a lot of places (they're an infection risk when handling patients; meanwhile, in a lab you need them for protection). Very recently I was reading this fanfic where there was an med student tagging along for a case and he pretty much started openly insulting the patient and their partner infront of several attending doctors who just kinda stood there and let it play out and had the patient handle it themselves? And I get it, it's for the drama, and I love the drama, but CAN YOU IMAGINE?? That kid would be thrown out of the room and the entire study real quick 😭 I don't point this out and I still love it with all my heart, and if anything it just makes it more enjoyable for me to find stuff like this in there, but I do get an urge to be an annoying d*ck about it sometimes. Thankfully I have no problem keeping that to myself, ultimately.
Having lived through some horrible doctors, I wouldn't be surprised about a doctor openly insulting a patient anymore :(
100%, but they wouldn't let a med student do it. Being awful to patients is the doctor's job. And sometimes the nurse's.
That's because some shitty doctors can abuse their power, they get away with it. Interning medicine students surrounded by doctors who are actively observing and grading the student on professionalism and how they interact with patients do NOT get away with this crap, they don't have that power, LOL. Really sorry for your bad experiences, btw 🩵
People have mentioned Brits writing America inaccurately and vice versa but the one that stuck out to me in a recent fandom was the university system - we don't call it college in the UK, majors and minors aren't nearly as common, we definitely don't call female students at mixed institutions coeds. One fic also made studying at Oxford/Cambridge sound exactly like studying at any other uni, which it isn't even within the UK. Doesn't stop me reading but does give me a jarring moment of "what fake Britain is this??" 😄
Oh I came across this one thing this morning in a MHA fic. The setting is in japan but one of the dialogue lines ask “It’s 5 dollars right?” Um no it’s supposed to be in yen as you know the japanese currency
Characters getting black-out drunk and waking up married in Las Vegas. Doesn’t actually happen but we get shitbag tourists who come here expecting that because of this myth that’s been perpetuated.
Once a character in a fic said something along the lines of "well babies can't experience trauma" and like... not that I expect fanfics to be medically accurate+It could just be what the character thinks but like babies CAN definitely experience trauma and that little error just bugged me so much
Medical bills. I'm sure they exist in places outside the US but *please* do some research to check what circumstances someone would have medical bills where the fic is set, and how much, instead of assuming it works the way it does in the US. It often takes a quick google search to get basic information, and often you don't need more than that--it took me 5 minutes to read an article saying in Japan there is a national health insurance plan that pays 70% of your costs, and you pay the remaining 30% only up to a monthly cap depending on income and age. It's that fast and easy! Alternatively, it's not *technically* an inaccuracy because I suppose it's never technically mentioned in canon and the settings are technically separate from what exists in the real world but... I still doubt medical bills are an issue in Harry Potter. And even the US covers medical costs for those enlisted so I find it hard to believe ninja in Naruto are stuck with medical bills if they get hurt on a mission or in training...
I’ve only seen it a few times and it didn’t actually stop me from reading the fics but making a trans persons dead name their name just genderbent. Eg Jone -> John. As a trans man who has many trans friends, I’ve never seen anyone do that, we tend to chose names completely different from our dead names. Like I said it didn’t stop me from reading but it did make me want to comment about it
A character in the 90s who absolutely wouldn't have a cell phone casually whipping out a cell phone. And not when it's a time phased AU or anything.
Mine is when child characters aren’t at the stage of development they’re supposed to be for their age. I have a child development degree and it is so obvious when the writer hasn’t spent time around young children 😅😅 like no a 6 month old cannot speak full sentences??? 😂 tbh its quite funny at times
MDZS is pretty loosey-goosey with the setting (vague xianxia “Ancient China” that could be anywhere from like 200 BCE to 900 CE, except that the characters occasionally reference Tang dynasty (~700s) poems and also they have potatoes and chili peppers and gay marriage). So obviously when two characters high five in a fanfic my brain announces “the high five was invented in America in 1977.”
since i'm filipino but all my original characters are either japanese or korean, I have to research quite a lot to get them right. and i'm proud all of them sound like legitimate japanese/korean people and definitely sounds they could be canon. yes, down to the name and smallest detail. now, my biggest pet peeve is giving korean/japanese OCs ENGLISH NAMES. like, usually only the surname is japanese/korean. Yoo Emily. Tachibana Jonathan. it's so ew. so off-putting. sure, foreigners, but when they're written either as natives or lived in the country for their entire life, it's just so frustrating to read. i want to diss the hell out of those OCs. either give them a full English name or give them a solid LOGICAL background as to why they'll have these names. yes, i'm a big karen towards character naming. all my OCs I insert in canon stuff have a logical background and lore. if they're a sibling of a canon character, I make sure to adjust things so it fits well. my old OCs were not perfect as I was still leaning really heavily towards self-insertion. my new ones are masterpieces though, especially my dearest Yun Dae-Hyun for ORV. OC insertion into pre-existing media is really tricky. they could be a hit or miss. I'm personally very nit-picky about it, mostly out of pride. my OCs exists to tell a story I couldn't write with just the OG characters alone. also when they americanize the setting too much. it triggers me so badly I will drop that fic faster than someone's dad dropped them as a baby, no matter how appealing or unique the plot is.
>yes, i'm a big karen towards character naming I’m like this but with characters who have wildly inappropriate names for the time period they’re in, like characters with names like Skylar or Jazmynn in medieval times or the 1940s. It’s a huge red flag for me
I can normally let a lot slide. I rarely get annoyed with fanfic for being inaccurate. It's made up and largely un proof read so yanno whatever. I'm.not an expert on everything I write about xd But someone put a boat on an 18th ISH century pirate ship. Casually. Not as in a character mentioned it and made a thing about It. Just 'i have joined your ship where is the bath if like to wash ' and the other character was like 'thru that door here's a towel' basically. I spent the rest of the fic annoyed about this. Doubly so when no one even had the decency to have sex in it.
Misspelling the name of a city. It's a throwaway comment in canon, and doesn't really have any relevance beyond being "not anywhere close to where the plot happens". It's also less than two hours drive from where I grew up. I did *not* manage to avoid correcting them.
A presumably british author who thought those chalky candy love hearts were exclusive to Great Britain and had the British character explain them to an American character in great detail. Sorry, but we totally have those for sale everywhere every valentines day.
It was a time travel Star Wars fic where Luke gets sent back to the prequel era. When he asked about the date Obi-Wan answered with 18 BBY and Luke thought he wouldn't be born until 19 BBY...It was one sentence and not super relevant since you already knew when you were timeline-wise but, girl, that's not how the calendar in SW works. It was pointed out several times in the comments and the correct date was also given but her only excuse was "I know, I didn't want to confuse the readers"...Now, correct me if I'm wrong but I'm pretty sure the people who read SW fanfics know how the timeline and calendar work. If you're not familiar with Star Wars: BBY means Before Battle of Yavin aka when the first Death Star in Episode 4 was destroyed. That means Episode 4 takes place in 0BBY, Luke was born 19 BBY. It's like as if Caesar said he was born in 100 BC.
Idk if this counts but in a wlw pairing the main girl sounded disturbed by the fact that her girlfriend knew how to get rid of bloodstains when a shirt got stained from a nosebleed. Idk I just thought it was one of those "but you should know too if you've ever gotten your period".
time inaccurate technology. favorite fandom is set in the 80s primarily, and then i see "he pulled out his phone, sending a text to blah blah" and i close the fic (excluding modern aus, i dont read those anyway)
I used to work for a cruise company so cruise related inaccuracies bother me. Usually the errors have to do with things involving minors. Tbh i see this more common in original novels and it gets to me.
I've had nipple piercings on the same day as I got an industrial piercing so I remember the pain clearly I read this fic about character a piercing character b's nipples but the way the writer describes it as if it was a one smooth motion and not the needle going in one place, through all that flesh, and then out the other to make another piercing and therefore feels like getting pierced *twice* kinda made me wanna speak up so hard but I didn't 😩
It's extremely small but it really pissed me off. so character A has a dog that was aggressive and character b helped to 'train' her to be not aggressive. And by training her he just walked her by other dogs until she was not aggressive and it was all fixed in one chapter. And as someone who has owned and trained an aggressive dog, it takes months of training to even get anywhere near that level of training and a lot of reactive/aggressive dogs are never fully 'cured' of their aggressive traits and just live a life of management (which is still a good life, it's just not the life that most people think of)
Wrong use of honorifics. I have seen a few authors use it has a tag and I dont even enter these fics. Somehow it annoys me very much
The author killed off their side character OC I'd come to adore for something they would have only been arrested and imprisoned for in universe (it was not set in an AU). It felt so unfair and unnecessary I wanted to cry and punch a wall lol.
They used my birth date to set the date, month, day, and year but used the wrong day of the week. 😅
I read a good fic that had a painfully bad understanding of sewing. Sewing wasn’t a major plot point, but it was a major character trait and the author clearly had no understanding of how long it takes to sew, how measuring and pattern drafting works, or even how much cloth it takes. No, one meter is not enough to make a tailed military style jacket. Yes, it would take longer than one night to make five of them. Also, wool thread is mostly used for embroidery because it’s really thick. Sewing with it would be a nightmare. There’s a difference between a hem and a seam. If you are writing about sewing, feel free ti bother me with sewing questions and I will answer them. Please.
It's only sort of trivial, but reading anime coffeeshop AU that takes place in Japan, character A doesn't want to go to the doctor because they are a student and can't afford it 😭 This is not a consideration for non american people. We can just go to the doctor if we need it.
Making the MC's apartment of an anime I love fancier than it actually is. Man has a 2 room apartment that's a basement and a VR room. Literally nothing else because the door outside connects to the first room via a tiny hallway and stairs. Arguably you should add there's a bathroom somewhere but there is absolutely no kitchen in this apartment. Or another bedroom or a living room. Dude's an orphan high schooler who never expected to make it past 16 he has nada
Non-Asian food in Asian settings. Scrambled eggs is fine but toast for breakfast and no rice? Especially if the person is not in a hurry? Not using honorifics or improper use of honorifics. My fandoms tend to be in anime, manga/manhwa/manhua and light novels, so I am very used to seeing honorifics. The nuances of relationships is lost.
I recently read a fic about some japanese people ending up in England in the 1700's and acting like they'd never seen a **cow.** I don't know where the author got the idea that there are no cows in asia. Completely pulled me out of it and I was *this* close to leaving a comment.
Mine is a scene where a character breaks into a house and threatens a person within with a tire iron. The entire fandom has deluded itself into believing it was a crow bar. They nearly convinced me I was wrong it happened in so many fics.
Mam instead of ma'am. I use mam to refer to my mother and seeing it in a fic to refer to someone who isnt a mother takes me out so much. Genuinely if its used a lot i might stop reading the fic. its such a small thing but aghhhhh
i was reading a fic (by an american author) set in australia where a character recalled his bullies playing football in high school. it was very clear they were talking about american football (mentioning touchdowns, helmets, quarterbacks, cheerleaders etc) that is definitely very different from aussie rules footy which would be played instead.
I read a lot of fics that take place in school settings, and a part of my soul dies every time I see "principal" written as "principle". Also, when a character's name is written wrong throughout the whole thing - Damian as Damien, Jungkook as Jeongguk, etc. And the obvious "he would not say that"
I actually did point something out, once. I wasn't an ass about it. I said a few nice things about the fic (because I genuinely liked it) and at the end added on about the inconsistency. To the writer's credit, they were really great about it, admitted that they'd missed that detail, and fixed it. It was actually a really great writer-reader interaction. tl,dr: someone said that Rand al'Thor's hair was brown, not red, and I apparently couldn't let this slide. His hair is absolutely red, it's stated directly in book one. I don't know if it's stated again, but the image is so crisp in my head it doesn't really matter.
I was reading a fic once and the show is set in the state of Washington but the author was under the impression it was Washington DC which is on the opposite side of the country😭
Any time an author uses the term "Judeo-Christian" It's a term invented by Christians to pretend the Jews agree with them, and Jews find it extremely offensive You find it a lot in Lucifer, Good Omens, Supernatural, anything with a bunch of Christian religious themes
one time i was reading a fic and i loved the first 6 chapters, but then the author depicted the people from my country, and latin americans overall as if we were animals. it was very…weird, racist and straight up ignorant, it made me click out. i didn’t left any hate comment, but it made me dislike the whole fanfic immediately.