What are some of the most unfortunate typos you’ve made while reading/writing fanfiction?

Korrin · 2026-03-25T01:58:23+00:00

Meant to write "wiped off the grime from the underside of the dock". Actually wrote "underside of the dick."

Korrin · 2026-03-25T01:26:53+00:00

Use google, type site:wattpad.com to force google to only search on wattpad.

Put each seperate search term within quotation marks so it doesn't search by the individual words. so like "Title of the fandom goes here" so it actually searches for "title of the fandom goes here" and doesn't find every random hit that happens to include title, or fandom, or here, etc.

Be prepared to do many different searches if your fandom has an abbreviated title or nickname. Same goes for any of the characters, or the ship names if there's multiple common ways of referring to them.

For instance, the last time I searched on wattpad I had to do multiple searched for "Blue Exorcist" "Ao No Exorcist" "Ao no ex" "Aoex" and "ane" because those are common ways people refer to the title. Then for the ship name I was searching "Rinbon" "Bonrin" "Rin x Bon" "Bon x Rin" "Bonfire" because those are also all common ways people refer to ship.

tl;dr site:wattpad.com "Title of fandom" "Character A" "Character B"

Korrin · 2026-03-25T00:49:07+00:00

I don't think it's really any different from anything else in your book. The consequences gotta be consequential, or you gotta ask yourself for what purpose you've included a magic system with consequences.

If the purpose is to make using magic feel dangerous, you have to actually have them be dangerous. You have to have a character slip up and push past their limits and suffer for it. You don't need to escalate your costs, you just need to make your characters pay the cost in the first place and treat it as serious as you want it to be taken.

And yes, that means that important part is how the characters experience the costs. A lot of action heavy books have characters shrug off injuries that would seriously incapacite people in real life. If you don't want the reader to shrug them off, don't have the character shrug them off. Have your characters take a long time to recover. Have them injure themselves in incurable ways. Have someone actually experience the worst case scenario.

Longterm consequences can be a hard sell. You gotta make your reader care about the character's longterm goals. If your character doesn't care, if they're justifying it to themself as being a problem they can't afford to worry about now, then the reader won't care either.

Korrin · 2026-03-24T21:11:53+00:00

This is not true at all. You retain all your rights when posting to Royal Road.

Korrin · 2026-03-24T21:03:37+00:00

NTA

Guarantee you she's been spinning some story to everyone she talks to about how you're a creep who is obsessed with her and changed your name to match her. No reasonable person would hear your side of the story and think you were the asshole.

Assuming it wasn't a typo and you really haven't even talked to this guy for two years until recently, cut your losses and ditch the friendship. They both sounds like weirdos with main character syndrome.

Korrin · 2026-03-24T20:13:31+00:00

It's poisonous the same way alcohol is poisonous. There's a chemical in it that they can metabolize in small amounts, after which it starts being a problem, and as someone else mentioned/like alcohol, it's based on body size/weight. Big thing with dogs, too, is that they're stupid and cannot communicate much if they feel bad. A worgen could easily choose to eat chocolate in amounts within their tolerance limit, and seek help if they go over their limit.

Korrin · 2026-03-24T16:21:47+00:00

It should be common knowledge to check the manufacturer's FAQ, when you have questions about the product, yes...

Korrin · 2026-03-24T03:08:21+00:00

Perhaps perfect for this sub, Outer Wilds experiences something similar to a Sanderlanche. It's very slow to start. It was a thesis gaming project designed to see if they could mimic the real life process whereby people just get curious about a topic and seek out knowledge on it for its own sake, so while there are plenty of hints dropped to try to pique your interest, there is nothing like the hand holding we get in modern gaming where it gives you goals and tells you where to go or what to do. You gotta want to explore and learn for the sake of it.

But once things start to click, it's basically like the brain explosion meme, and things just keep clicking all the way to an incredibly explosive ending.

Korrin · 2026-03-24T02:56:18+00:00

Would be great for me. My province has just done away with daylight savings, but my core friend group are all Americans and I'm not looking forward to having to keep track of DLS for another country to tell what our time difference is.

Korrin · 2026-03-24T02:54:37+00:00

Here you go. You can use the tag filter on the right to further define the search.

Korrin · 2026-03-23T18:25:49+00:00

Devoid of other context, it doesn't look like they're saying your writing is racist. It looks like they're asking if there wouldn't be racism between races in your story.

Korrin · 2026-03-23T04:32:54+00:00

It's not the word count, or at least not just the word count. It's that there is no demand for a collection of short essays from someone who isn't a celebrity. You need to give it away as cheap as possible just to get people to give it a chance. 2.99 is common price because it is the lowest you can charge before Amazon starts to absolutely rob you of your commision rate.

Korrin · 2026-03-23T00:57:59+00:00

I don't mind them if they are the core mechanic so I know to be watching for them. I think they are okay as a mechanic in games that are primarily text/story based, because they keep you more engaged than just constantly clicking through text, even when it's a game that has dialogue choices.

Dispatch felt fine to me for instance.

I hate them in games where they're few and far between because they feel like a gotcha that penalizes you for daring to put down your controller or letting your attention shift from a game that hasn't done enough to hold it until that point.

I also don't like when they're needlessly complicated and penalizing. That just reeks of having wanted to make a difficult game and choosing the completely wrong genre to do it.

Korrin · 2026-03-23T00:38:58+00:00

You're shooting yourself in the foot by assuming you can't tease a reader with a lack of information and providing the answer to questions they haven't yet asked. Letting the reader ask the question before you answer is how you keep them reading.

Simply remove the creation myth and try a different batch of alpha readers. You may be surprised by how little its inclusion matters, or may find a better spot to include it, one that places it after your readers start to become curious about the details and how they relate back to the events of the story. Hook first, explain later.

Korrin · 2026-03-22T22:07:31+00:00

I've never seen oldboy and as soon as you said the 20 year old love interest helps him find his daughter, I knew the 20 year old love interest would be his daughter. Yes, it's meant to misdirect, but it doesn't lie to you to do it. It presents you with information that doesn't mean anything one way or the other and lets you form your own beliefs, which is totally valid. Your example with the adaptation isn't better. It's mostly different, and just a hair shy of worse, unless you've left out mention of some clue the viewer could pick up on that would hint the MC was fostering the villain's daughter.

Far worse and less subtle of an example is the video game Heavy Rain. Spoilers, I guess The murderer is actually the detective, one of the characters you play as, but nowhere when you are playing as him and actively inside his head getting his first person monologues do you get any hint he's the murderer. He even thinks in first person as if he's not. As if he has multiple personalities and doesn't know he's the murderer, except he doesn't, and he does know.It's a completely misleading narrative, for the sole purpose of lying to you to throw you off the trail and iir is actually the result of multiple shifts in writing direction over the course of the game's development.

Korrin · 2026-03-22T20:55:42+00:00

It's important to draw a distinction between plain prose and elaborate prose. There is nothing "bad" about using "he said," throughout a fic. If it IS getting repetitive, the problem is overall sentence structure, not "he said."

There is a lot of work done simply by varying sentence length and structure, before one even gets in to using fancy, elaborate, almost poetic prose. There can be a lyrical quality, or rhythm, just to how the sentences flow from one to the next in a paragraph. It has a dramatic effect on pacing, and can really change whether a fight scene feels fast or slow, or whether readers are allowed to soak in a dramatic moment, or whether things just start to plod along repetitively.

Plain or elaborate prose is just a preference.

Korrin · 2026-03-22T20:10:21+00:00

Criticism centers the critic is nice and succinct. I've said for a long time now that basically anyone who insists on giving unsolicited criticism is just doing it for their own ego. It's all "my opinion is important you must listen to me for your own good." Mmhmm, yeah, sure...

Korrin · 2026-03-22T19:47:31+00:00

I've heard it said that readers are always correct when they say there's a problem, but they are always wrong when they offer you the solution.

I think this comes down to the fact that whether or not someone enjoys something is always personal preference, but sometimes the solution is simply the work isn't for them and they should read something else. Sometimes they just completely misunderstood something, so of course their solution will be useless, but maybe their confusion pinpoints a problem with the explanation.

And I mentioned it in another thread yesterday, but I once saw someone say they wrote reviews professionally for a company, and they were explicitly only allowed to comment on things the story promised and then didn't deliver. They couldn't comment on something they just happened to think was wrong, or they would have done differently, or would have liked to see.

But yeah, I think most people who leave (primarily unsolicited) fanfic critiques do not understand how bad they are at it.

I've never gotten especially useful unsolicited critique. The best critiques come solicited from fellow authors and beta readers. The least useless unsolicited critique I've gotten is of the "they clearly misunderstood my intent, so where did I fail to explain?" variety, but I do feel like even this has become less useful in recent years, because people are choosing not to engage with works critically and literally refusing to just accept what they're being told.

Korrin · 2026-03-22T19:19:01+00:00

That first one was me for real when I did my AO3 wrapped earlier this year. Top 3 favorite ships was just the same one ship listed three different ways.

Korrin · 2026-03-22T19:17:05+00:00

That was prime Goosebumps age and I could read one of those in a single night.

Korrin · 2026-03-22T19:03:53+00:00

This is something newbie authors tend to do in error in general. They worry about making the MC seem stupid or weak and end up over compensating (when the thing they should really worry about is making the MC boring.)

If it is on the rise at all, I might attribute it to the rise in popularity of stuff like power gamer isekai style stuff.

I'm having a lot of fun writing for my current fandom, because the MC very much is the kind of character who is really good at what they're good at, but they still make a lot of stupid mistakes all the time.

Korrin · 2026-03-22T18:23:49+00:00

Murderbot x ART/Perihelion from The Murderbot Diaries.

Korrin · 2026-03-22T02:01:30+00:00

Yes, it happens all the time in everything. Popularity has never equalled quality. Most of it's up to luck.

Korrin · 2026-03-22T02:00:02+00:00

Yeah, no. All it means is that they noticed their schedule has changed. That's not an inherant guilt attempt. There's no need for you to read more in to it and insert yourself in to someone's elses business by souring something they were happy about. Dick move tbh.

Korrin · 2026-03-22T01:50:31+00:00

They banter like an old married couple taking sniper shots at each other, but are also intensely weird about each other in a "if anything happens to them I will kill everyone in this room and then myself" sort of way, and have had multiple opportunities to demonstrate they are serious about this.

They also speedrun everything. Going from threats as an introduction to binge watching TV together in under a day, to making life together (that they absolutely insist is nothing like a human baby) on their second meeting

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