What are some red flags you notice in a novel early on

If the novel says
- a doctor/assassin transmigrated to a waste/brainless body and vowed to overpower the world
- if there's rape/tragedy tag
- the first few chapters screams ML is domineering slash rapist
- first chapter shows that the novel will follow a no logic plot
- (just this year) if the author introduces the ML as a possessive person and let him speak and act very cringe.
- when ML just fell in love with MC for no reason.
- the first chapter wherein the just transmigrated MC faces a face-slapping scenes/playing against the scumbags/faces people's hate for the origHost
- MC is blatantly stupid/white lotus
- i forgot, the synopsis goes like the rebirth wife from a tragic past life, marrying the disabled/gloomy/paranoid/scary richest man in China/World. Then pampers her to the extreme.
- Synopsis screams a dodder MC and domineering president ML

 

... So... If one of the roleplays I participated was a novel... All those tags would apply to it, except the rape one, it was only a rape attempt that she suffered... >.>

My characters tend to suffer a bit too much... Teeheehee?

 

I love it when fantasy/isekai novels don't bother naming the city and country it's set in. It says a lot about how much the author cares about the world and about the quality of the writing.

 

When everything that involves the protagonist produces positive results . It's like they have both a weighted dice and an extra dice whenever the author tries to figure out what happens.

For example: someone that is just powerful enough to be a threat and the mc happens to cross paths for no reason except for the mc to get exactly what they were looking for or happen to need in the next 20 chapters as loot from them. Instead of having to search for this inexplicably rare but known about thing or spend resources or time on it they just get it on the way to the next plot point.

Example 2: The Cave King Will Live a Paradise Life (SPOILERS). Anything the mc does after getting to the island happens to be the very best possible thing to happen.
Some goblins shipwreck on his island = the most loyal servants ever + an adoring female.
Forgetting he is holding an rare stone he hasn't inspected yet and for some reason putting it down on a skeleton instead of a table or his pocket (it may have fallen of a table due to how bad he is at doing anything when the author want so) = a resurrected equally loyal dwarf master smith but no one notices until he just starts working on a forge + he didn't even find out it was the stone that did the thing (if i remember correctly).
He mines into a room with a plant that feeds on magic and he is very magic at this point (I don't remember if this is right. I was already loosing interest at this point) = no problem its just feeding on a mana stone but intelligent and willing to be nice. I think it just became his pet after he gave it mana instantaneously solving the island being barren problem. The only thing this caused before this was the view being boring but the character thoughts kept bringing up issues with the barrenness like the lack of fruit or farmable soil.
The goblins evolve! guess who just got a smoking hot, adoring and sweet girlfriend who just so happens to be a princess as their gf the very following private conversation now that its not jailbait or degenerate to even consider it. No build up other than being the generic nice and generous guy to the goblins and her always having adored the mc for how good is. She even loses any identifiable hob-gobling traits she should have because she just loves the mc that much and the author would never be inconvenienced by having other think his creation might be a degenerate who could even think of an non-human as a romantic partner without outright telling the reader this. (this is where i stopped reading)
Literally anything that might have a random result always has the best possible outcome. Nothing even mildly inconvenient happens to the mc after arriving to the island. no sores or fatigue. no issues with loneliness since before the goblins arrive he just talks to the very intelligent elementals/golems he can create. what's the first uncommon find he gets? a stone that increases his max mana. was he even suffering from a lack of mana before that? not really, he was in a dopamine induced exercising spree for finally being free and realizing how good it feels to move his body.

Sometimes it's just the signs of the author being in a hurry to get the mc to be what they imagined them as instead of just starting from there for some reason. for a smaller example a randidly ghosthound inspired novel had the mc do 200 chapters of progress in 50 smaller chapters but they didn't change the style of the story so he just zoomed past all the challenges as the sole inheritor of something that might be found in the chapters after 500 in the inspiring novel. He could have just started the story at that point as many stories have shown to be possible.

Speaking of inheriting something. the mmo/rpg or any similiar genres with super rare unique classes that can be just stumbled into by the mc but don't ever have a class equal to them by any other from the cast and no one really cares even if mc just started yelling everyone about how op rare his class was instead of always keeping quiet about if as that would keep anyone from noticing he now somehow performs ten times better than anyone else. Someone put a op unfair class into a multiplayer and they just keep commenting hax like the peanut gallery they are but nothing is done for this to be balanced. It's like a game having told everyone that the games rarities are common, uncommon, rare, epic & legendary but then the game only has a grand total of 1 legendary and 10 epics all of them unique and inaccessible to the rest of the server. Yet somehow this is the game that millions want to play.

 

I guess perceived time is also a factor its not really good if they experience one event after another for example the mc just got out of the hospital and gets kidnapped.

 

Oh yeah, totally! It's quite different if it happens in-between multiple chapters or if one thing happens right after the other~

Gotta give the character and the readers some breathing room after all~

 

• Arrogant ML & his playful d***
• Extra glamorous (female body parts)
• Spineless MC & other characters

 

I'm honestly curious about what you classify as a playful dick.

Like, just an MC that sleeps around?

 

His manwhore dick? Is this fine?
I meant what you said —sleeping around

 

*confused Alice noises*

Oooooooooh~

Yeah, that's something that would make me drop things easily, probably... Can't say I ever encountered a novel where this happened though... >.>

 

Its soo~oo damn annoyin' reading novels where a trash of an ML (*flexing his dick*)was changed in a heartbeat by the MC
-ᄒᴥᄒ-

 

Steaming piles of exposition.
Poor environmental/character descriptions.
STIFF dialogue.

 

when the title have word like :
-the weakest
-cheat
-the strongest
-slow life
-slave
-harem
etc
i know they explain why japanese title always have long title but really ?

in early story, if theres another races beside human, the first races that mc meet is elf/beastman girl first , bonus point if they are slave, that novel is guaranteed trash for me atleast

 

1.Top *insert profession* in previous life is almost a no for me. It's almost guaranteed that author has no actual clue about *insert profession*.

2. General assholism from MC and/or arrogance.

3. People screaming, insulting and just generally being belligerent towards supposedly all powerful beings.

4. Use of all caps in any converations.

5. Use of onomatopoeia which automatically tells me something authors skill level (especially if its original not japanese).

6. In the case of original novels, the use of chinese/japanese writing styleswhen setting has nothing to do the them.

7. Similar to (6), the use of chinese phrasings and behaviour in non-chinese novels is super cringe for me.

 

Another one will be the mc waking up in the woods and within the first 3 chapters founds a carriage being attacked by some wolves, bandits or goblins. The cliche will definitely be that the carriage is owned

 

Not instant drop level of red flag, but any of the following will drop my respect for the responsible party:

1. Obviously wrong pronouns for a character. If you are regularly reading a line where it's obvious that a female character is being referenced as he/him then you know that not only was the translation lazy, it clearly didn't get proof read or edited properly.
2. Similarly, lines contradicting their context. The worst offender is a negated meaning, things like "they can" when it should be "they can't". A translator should be able to recognise when they've arrived at a translation that doesn't fit the previous lines.
3. Amnesia with no reasonable in-story addressing of the consequences. I don't care how good a transmigration protag is at improv, not having access to the host's memories will result in a radical personality change that everyone will notice. Such a change isn't going to be ignored either. Such basic things as speech patterns and how they walk will seem like a completely different person.
4. Character or world mechanics that are so contrived or logically flawed that the author will struggle to keep the work moving without jumping through contortions at some point. There's a certain smut over on scribble that claims that in the past humans died when they turned 18. The issue is that, for basic population maintenance, humans would have to couple up and birth an average of 3 surviving children before they turn 18. Realistically that means they're going to start trying to get pregnant as soon as physically possible. A population like that would go extinct within a couple hundred years.
5. Characters explaining something when everyone present is fully aware of that information. Sure, the audience is now informed but the other characters should be confused and concerned at the speech.
6. Butlers named Sebas. It stopped being funny years ago, of either the author is lazy or they're flogging a dead meme.

Stuff like this.

 

When the protag succeed at everything with ease, either by being a genius, lucky or cheats.
Overpowered characters can be fun, but it get annoying really quick if the character masters all kinds of magic as a toddler, then goes on to be a sword master and a genius at business or whatever else the author tries to cram in.
Also stories where the mc reincarnate as a baby and pretty much half of the story is just all the other characters acting like creeps that can only talk about how cute the mc is.

 

Tbf, this one is probably on the translator and not on the author.

Like, usage of onomatopoeia is just part of the norm for Japanese Webnovels. Just like how they don't put speech markers, they also use onomatopoeias quite a bit... I think the translator should just have enough sense to remove them because they don't translate well.

... No excused if it's an original though, then the author is just too much of an amateur.

Oh, I can agree to that one. I remember playing an Otome game centered around Amnesia, and on the first two routes I played, the MC's memory loss was instantly found out by her boyfriend, because like... How could he possibly not notice?

Then in the other two routes the heroine is somehow able to keep it a secret all the way until the end... And uhn... Well, I actually loved one of those routes, but still... I liked the early parts of the route a lot more when the memory loss was instantly discovered. It just pulled me in a lot more easily because the MC had someone to support her and help her cope with the memory loss and stuff... It was nice~

I can sorta understand the other characters not suspecting an amnesia because uhn... Well, would you ever simply imagine someone lost all their memories? That's usually not something that comes to mind... But well, the MC should probably be a bit more open about those things to get help in general I'd say~

*shivers* I haaaaaaate this! Like... Dear god, why!? Why do those exist!? >.<

 

"I created a dungeon with a dragon as a pet". Entertainment is escapeism. But i fear for people who escape to this kind of novels.

 

I hate shoujo reincarnation with genius assassin or godly doctor or anything like that. I do not mind genius assassin and godly doctor in the fictional world but NOT in the real world (since they mostly reincarnate from real world to fictional world) because there's NO such thing as genius assassin and godly doctor in the real world!!!

Nobody should know the name of a genius assassin or else they will not be an effective assassin, and you either work with the government (thus a soldier) or with very powerful drug lords (thus a thug or a gangbanger). You need to work with the CIA to regularly assassinate people of importance or else you just kill rando men because their wife want inheritance and that's not assassination in my book, that's just regular hired killer.

And godly doctors need godly equipment like ct scanner or x ray or gigantic pharmaceutical industry behind them.