Updated June 18, 2017

I’m a student studying biology and addicted to reading fanfiction. The fanfiction obsession started with Buffy/Angel, then branched off to Lord of the Rings and from there to Harry Potter. At some point X-Men got added to the mix, as did Stargate SG-1 and Atlantis, Prison Break, the Bourne Series, Star Wars, Avatar, Star Trek (2009), The Mentalist, White Collar, Avatar, Avengers/Thor and most recently Lucifer. There was also a short sojourn into the Criminal Minds fandom.

Whichever fandom I am currently focusing on, Harry Potter is the fandom that I fall back on when I run out of stories to read in other fandoms. But until I can’t find anymore good stories in a given fandom I tend to browse one fandom and one fandom only. And within each fandom I always focus on stories revolving around one favourite character, which I figure I might as well list here:

But whatever the fandom, I prefer stories that are serious (i.e., not humour and definitely not parody) and angsty with hurt/comfort and whump and even drama. I also like stories that have some nice action in them, but I also read slow-paced fics and I love it when there’s some nice character development and/or exploration. I have no problem with more explicit content, be it sexual or blood and gore; I actually prefer higher rated stories since they feel more gritty and real to me, what with things not being left out or glossed over. Romance is not high on my list. That is, I am not a shipper of any particular ships and don’t go looking for romance fics. I like stories that have a good plot. If that plot also contains a relationship, that’s fine, but the plot comes first.

Apart from a good plot, writing quality is very important to me. If the spelling sucks, the grammar is bad, punctuation wrong...well, then I give up after just a few sentences or paragraphs. Those issues ruin stories for me. However, there have been a few fics that I read and have on my favourites list or in my C2 that suffer from some of these problems, but they make up for it in plot or characterization or what have you. Though to me it seems that there is no reason to put a story out there that is riddled with spelling/grammar/punctuation mistakes. Everyone makes them, but that’s what editing is for (among other things) and what beta readers can help with (also among other things). A writer who doesn’t put any effort into catching any mistakes and writing a story that is easy and enjoyable to read is either lazy or just doesn’t care about their story, so why should I, as a reader, care to read it?

Beta readers are also really good at helping the author catch factual or canon mistakes. For example, in the Harry Potter fandom a common mistake is confusion between (and misspelling of) Legilimency and Occlumency. Another thing beta readers are really useful for is avoiding things that interrupt or inhibit the flow of the story or that just ‘sound’ weird. Examples that come to mind are overly detailed descriptions of the characters (if you read fanfiction, chances are you’re a fan and know what the character looks like, so only a short description is needed - at the most), characters speaking with the wrong accent or using expressions they never would in canon, characters behaving out of character, exaggerations in what a character looks like (e.g., Harry being as tall as a first year when he is in his firth year - he’s short but not that short) or weird and contradictory descriptions like someone being “roughly 5’7”” (they’re either roughly five and a half feet or exactly 5’7”). A beta reader would also point out formatting issues, like a lack of scene or point-of-view separations by way of horizontal lines, for example, or too long paragraphs that make the story hard to read.

Some personal pet peeves in addition to the issues I mentioned so far are when the author puts Author’s Notes in the middle of a chapter (which mostly turn out to be inane and completely superfluous comments), mix up of homonyms - words that sound the same or similar but mean different things (their/they’re/there, here/hear, must’ve/must of, then/than, meet/meat etc.) - all or most characters suddenly being gay if the main pairing is a slash pairing, characters who don’t usually sing in canon suddenly humming or singing or paying a lot of attention to songs (with the lyrics given in the body of the chapter, of course) to songs they hear playing somewhere or that just ‘fit the situation’ or some such nonsense, and characters becoming (or just being) very different from their canon-selves without any gradual change but with some half-assed explanations like that they were ‘misunderstood’ (this happens a lot with Severus Snape in the Harry Potter fandom).

The stories in my favourites list and my C2 are stories that are well-written and don’t have any of the issues I listed (with some exceptions, but they’re still cool stories that make up for whatever problems they have). They tend to be long - the longer the better - though I have started reading shorter fics in the White Collar fandom, since there are so few to begin with. The favourites list contains stories of all the fandoms I’ve mentioned above, but the C2 is only for Harry Potter stories and Harry Potter crossovers. The pairings are varied, contained both slash and het, and the genres include pretty much anything except parody.

In addition to the stories in my C2 and on my favourite stories list I can recommend the following fics, which can’t be found on this site: