graculus

If a story is good enough, I'd overlook some flaws, like maybe one or two glaring lapses in logic (ie. characters flying from Bulgaria to Scotland on broomsticks in half an hour) or even slightly dodgy characterisation, but it would bug me the entire rest of the way through the story. Like there's one HP story I've been reading which happened to include emails, and consequently email addresses, for the characters, who were, in this fic, an MP and a peer. The email addresses were obviously just made up, but it bugged me all the way through the fic that they weren't in the actual format that MPs and peers email addresses are in. It's incredibly petty and totally irrelevant to the story as a whole, but it was there at the back of my mind for the entire rest of the fic. For all I know, it was a deliberate choice by the author not to use the real format for parliamentary emails, but it sort of felt more like a casse of slacking a bit on the research, and if she slacked there how do I know she didn't slack elsewhere. It puts doubt into your mind, and then the fic just loses something, because if the author doesn't care enough to do her research, why should I care when I'm reading it? If that makes sense.

Bad characterisation and impossible scenarios will throw me out of a fic immediately too. I'm very fussy these days, actually. I barely read anything. It's sad.