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Stuff that kills the book for me:
-books that open up with fight scenes out of nowhere about characters you don't care about yet. Done well, it can be interesting and can pull the reader in... but done badly, it can bore the crap out of me. If 10 pages fly by and it's a boring fight scene and I still have no idea who I'm dealing with or why they're fighting, I don't read further.
-sex scenes between characters that are minor or come out of nowhere. Sex scenes can be enjoyable, but if they don't advance the story in a meaningful way in terms of plot or character development, the author should cut it out.
-too stupid to live characters
-magic systems that the author doesn't follow
-silly fantasy names with apostrophes in the middle
-cliched descriptions. I love descriptions, I'm happy to read 5 pages about the pastoral scene or somebody's clothing if it's done in an entertaining or interesting way. But descriptions for the sake of descriptions is bad
-stories where the only black guy either dies first or is the villain out of nowhere
-science fiction stories where China is the world power and yet there aren't any real Chinese characters around, they're only a bunch of unequivocally evil shady people in suits. No yellow peril in my sci-fi, please.
-mining the same points above, if the non-white characters are constantly dehumanized or portrayed as villains in ways that seem idiosyncratic to the author rather than is part of the story, it can quickly become a wallbanger. If after reading the book, I need to read some Octavia Butler just to detox, that author is not likely to see any future sales from me
-bad research on other cultures. It's best to err on the side of too much research than on too little, because readers are from diverse backgrounds and come from all over the world.
The final four points may be pretty specific stuff to me, but I can't help it. I'm female, not white, and not American. I'm not asking for political correctness. I love splatter and excessive violence, I adore sensationalism and pulp, and one of my favourite directors is Quentin Tarantino. Really, I'm not asking for PC. I'm just asking for the author to treat humanity with a reasonable level of depth.
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