Otherwise known as the Apocalypseless Universe: Shinji gets together with Asuka or Rei (or Kaoru, depending on the ficcer's bent) and everyone leads happy, productive lives. Hello?! I've nothing against A/U per se, but they're only successful when the author doesn't lose track of what made the series tick in the first place. Don't have Hotohori and Nuriko date just because they both deserve happiness. Wishful thinking is easily abused.
Songfics do serve a beneficial purpose. They've outcompeted the stories in which a character hears a song on the radio (complete with lyrics) and realises in a sudden gestalt that said song exactly described his/her emotions of joy/pain/uncertainty/despair etc. Apart from that...? Not much, usually. Nobody's gonna love me for saying this -- not only is she dissin' other people's writing, she's dissin' their music too! -- but even a tremendously catchy song can have clichéd and mediocre lyrics, and guess what sort of fic that makes for? It's possible to compensate with good writing, but then I just ignore the song altogether, and I don't think that's ever the point.
This is not restricted to yaoi, really. But yes, the stories I've developed the big-mother passive-aggressive attitude toward are yaoi ones in which the main couple sort of droop over each other for the first one-third, only to figure out in fifteen lines that they're in love and spend the rest of the fic in a mindless passionate clinch. Can you say manufactured angst? (And it's always the same passionate clinch too, or so it seems. The whole nipple thing -- but don't get me started.)
Oh yes. The hoary chestnut. I'm presuming that everyone (like me) runs at least a quickie check on their word-processor before hitting the send button and collapsing because it's three in the morning. Unfortunately, that's not enough. The same spellchecker that lingers maddeningly over every given name and Japanese loanword will overlook the difference in usage between "whose" and "who's," not to mention "importune" and "opportune" (a mistake in an otherwise excellent story that had me confused for paragraphs). Human betas are still state-of-the-art. Take it from a computer science major, if you will.
It's not really his grin I hate, Shinigami fans. Give it a second and you'll realise just what I mean.
OOC probably worked fine for the first person who came up with it, and for the next five or six people who wanted to create an effect of amusing parodic contrast with the canon. But when it becomes a flimsy excuse for a story's lack of psychological vraisemblance, I say the point's been lost.
I don't just mean the self-insert sort of glomping, though that's bad enough. I am generous enough to include all cuddling and general emotional touchy-feeliness imposed on characters whose sense of self in the canon probably depended upon non-indulgence in such ickiness. Please do not be cute needlessly, minna-san. Pokémon and Bad Batz Maru have done enough for the world.
This is pretty damn well self-explanatory.
Worse than all the others that came before, because it affects good stories as well. My eyes have swum many a time from shifting the horizontal bar on my browser back and forth to read a fic in which each paragraph occupied a single line. Even more frequent -- and this is truly criminal -- are the times when I give up on such a fic without even trying because life's too short, what? Do something about this. Please.
MY GOD, IF I HAD A GUNDAM! THESE STORIES WOULD NOT SEE THE LIGHT OF DAY!!!
The equivalent of Bulwer-Lytton's "It was a dark and stormy night," natch. A pity that our collective ego-fragility fostered by electronic distance wouldn't be able to stand a set of worst-fic awards like the one named after the author of The Last Days of Pompeii ("What ho, let's sup!"). Then again, it would mean finding a very bad and very dead fanfic writer...