Discussion What Is A "Nope. I'm Outta Here" Flag For You When Reading Novels?

What is your biggest red flag when reading novels? When do you automatically dip tf outta there?

For me, it's when the incest tag is there, or the nationalistic stuff starts kicking in. Or the overbearing CEO type stuff (with exceptions ofc). Or the harem-she's-an-object signs start showing. Or kitten-kicking.

 

A boring synopsis. I usually commit to a novel I start reading, no matter how shit. I sometimes wish I could actually comment on the original chapters, but I guess anger levels are not yet sufficient to learn three Asian languages. T.T

 

When the male lead starts being all grabby when the female lead wants to do something that he thinks he knows better about. Don't bother to discuss the merits on how to go about it, and just restrain her.

 

when the author is emphasizing how average the protagonist is, the protagonist is so average that they are the most average to ever average. in fact the most unique thing about the protagonist is how average they are.
the underdog theme needs to die, your protagonist is the most overpowered thing in the universe more often than not. if you are going to make them so strong at least have the decency to revel in it like Overlord does it.

 

Repetition does it for me, or unnecessary violence (like an ML killing hundreds of people because the body he transmigrated to did papapa with other ladies in his harem so he killed them to show "sincerity" to the FMC). Another is really bad translations and novels that consists of mostly speech (eg. "..." said MC. "......" replied ML etc.)

 

When the reviews show signs of and the novel is tagged with tragedy, angst, incest, and the like.

 

repetition. Some levels of repetition are fine but when you feel like you have read the same thing twice already then it is a straight drop. nationalism is also very annoying depending on how strong it is presented. I drop a lot of novels that have a China numba wan, evil arrogant and stupid eagle kingdom responsible for every bad thing happening and all those arrogant rising sun kingdoms trash that get face-slapped. That is basically everything those ultra-nationalistic novels turn into. Propaganda.

 

tbh i get the icks pretty randomly lolol anyone?? sometimes its not really a major issue but i just feel like dropping

 

When it doesn't have an incest tag it's a nope.

 

Racism.

 

You can learn the selected vocabulary for those instances. A high school classmate could cuss in French, Spanish, and learned to sing "I am your mother's lover" in Pashtun from our Afghani firends.

Might have left a 'w' off there.

 

When a literal God kowtows or bows to apologize for accidentally killing the mc

 

It is usually a mental thing for me. A moment where I realize I just read five chapters and I mentally zoned out for all of them. This is why I avoid so many Chinese novels. The story overall might be good, but there is generally too much filler I don't care about

 

It changes for me. One trope will wear out then I rotate to a different. Right now, the racism is the ultimate evil trope is tired out. Yeah, it exists and I've been jumped for being Azn, but doesn't mean I want to read it for the umpteenth time.

 

Someone who knows what they like. I respect that.

 

1. Oversexualization of really young characters.
2. When translation is suddenly MTL.
3. Too much/little fluff.
4. Too many loopholes.
5. Bad Math, I'm seriously irked when the Math doesn't make sense.

 

Badly written or translated smut, I'd much prefer a fade to black than meat sticks in her juice.

 

A few such things for me are, forgotten Characters, like in a Harem Novel, MC had many hardships with said Woman, but after they became lovers, is the woman only all 50+ Chapters mentioned and that only once.
Another thing is if ONLY MC is the whole focus of the Story, not even side Characters appear, sometimes they appear, but become background characters in less then 20 Chapters. Like in a Story, all characters, aside from MC, are only to be used and thrown away after MC meets them a few times.

 

Inconsistent characters who are just hypocrites

• Like mc is greedy and keeps making money but says I don’t care about money and it’s not important
• Supposedly non-curious mc is inquisitive and curious about everything

And mc investing in crypto (tried to tolerate crypto shilling once because it’s fiction and expected it to be a random passing comment, but if it shows up often in non-investing novel it just feels like annoying garbage filler...so no more)

 

Misery Smut or when a character let themselves be bullied for some stupid reason.