Insta-love, once and for all...

Insta-love is annoying for me but not a deal-breaker. Now, infidelity is.

Main characters I can't like or respect - they are dumb or whiny or mean or whatever. Too much angst, especially if it is caused or made worse by characters like the above. A character can make a big mistake, but he should then set about repairing it, not stumble around making things worse.

Big Misunderstandings. Excellent writing can save this (excellent writing can save almost anything) but it tends to appear with other clunkiness much more often.

I am cooling on homophobic relatives and characters in the closet. There are too many of these, and often lately it feels like the characters don't have a good reason for being this way. Things are getting better, especially in big cities and creative professions and most universities. Yeah if you stuck in the rural south or in the middle of adopting a kid or something it can make sense.

BDSM that feels like bullying instead of like something the characters love and need.

I'm sure I will think of more. :-)

Trust issues as the main plot drives me nuts. If you don't trust each other, get the heck out of the relationship. I actually see that a lot less in m/m than I ever did in m/f. That might be a big reason I avoid m/f now:-)

I would like to agree with Charmingly on characters in the closet. Unfortunately, I still see people discriminate all of the time for sexual preferences, age, race, etc.It's pathetic how long it's taking this world to become truly civilized. (Sorry if I'm ranting.)

Big issue for me is when the character is injured or almost killed multiple times in one story. Think of the Promises series by Amy Lane. Those people needed their own hospital! Or when somebody finally realizes they really do love the other person but not until they were almost killed.

Ooo. TSTL characters! Forgot about that. That's a pet peeve for me. Big Misunderstandings/Miscommunication, eh, I can tolerate them to an extent.

Characters in the closet are not on my list of pet peeves, but are they are my list of undesirable things to read about. It depends on how much of the book is about this personal issue, which are depressing to read about, and I do-not-like-reading-sad-stories. Plus, it hits too uncomfortably close to home.

@KindleRomance
Hardly a day goes by without me reading a news report, or multiple, about bigotry. I just saw one about on the night news a few hours ago about a music teacher in an elementary school in the next city over separating white kids and black kids. I'll give you *one guess* to which group of kids he talked to and what he said. And believe it or not, it's not the first incident and even with this latest one he's still working there, walking in the hallway and shit.

Not surprising. Really. After all: Mississippi Officially Ratifies 13th Amendment Banning Slavery [early this year, 2013]… 148 Years Later http://www.addictinginfo.org/2013/02/18/this-just-in-mississippi-has-finally-abolished-slavery/ Yes. In America. Clerical error... right.

Also this: http://publicshaming.tumblr.com/ which will put anyone (well, non-bigoted people) in a suicidal mood.

I am so with you - TSTL and whiny is a killer combo...

And I also loathe it when authors jump on the BDSM train just because it is en vogue...

Insta-love, have yet to find one well-written.

The big misunderstanding or any other kind of juvenile/infantile behaviour more to be expected from a child or very young teen than a halfway adult person.

The Uke/Seme trope, or the western variant of alpha-male male with a lesser chick with a dick, yes, also when hidden away as Dom/submissive instead.

Alpha-males in general, I really hate them, right along with the typical professions, I'm dead tired of all those muscled he-men.

I love BDSM, but the vast majority of BDSM-themed books don't depict BDSM. Either it's a uke/seme trope in disguise, or an excuse to write rape/non-con/tortureporn without owning up to it. Also the ever-samey D/s or M/s straight from the Leather scene. Gay men have kinks across the whole spectrum of BDSM like everyone else and many move and play in pansexual circles.

M/M to me means two men, not exclusively two gay men born as males. There's more fish to fry, and I love reading about them all. So I really dislike books which come over as denigrating bisexuals or trans*people.

I hate it when men function in some all-male zone in m/m, or women are shown to be either bitches or selfless angels mothering/sistering/bearding gay men. I do not only not at all mind girl parts in m/m, I want them there. That's life and books which avoid this aren't something I like to read.

Shallow world building, especially in fantasy, science fiction, and historicals. Good world-building is a necessary part of those genres and it's fairly rare find good world-building in m/m.

The whole Alpha thing among shifters and vampires. Just once I'd like to read about a werewolf pack where there aren't any clear-cut Alphas.

Insta-love, soul-mates, and mate-bonds. They can be good if written properly but I think a lot of authors use them to short-cut the whole 'getting to know you' aspect of romance.

BDSM. It's really overdone, and from what I've heard from people actually in the lifestyle the way its portrayed in fiction is not really that normal in the scene. Not everyone in the scene is a Dom or sub or into being tied up and whipped, but if you just read m/m you'd think exactly that.

To a certain extent homophobia. Homophobic characters tend to come in exactly one flavor, that is the violent person (parent, neighbor, etc) who threatens the life and safety of the LBGTQ character. Extremely rare is the homophobic parent who loves their kid and believes that being gay is a disease that needs to be cured and sends them off to those anti-gay aversion "therapy". Which is a shame because I think that could lead to some interesting story lines since a lot of those places are real Clockwork Orange type stuff. In my own life I've personally gotten 'love the sinner hate the sin' far more than I have threats, but guess what, they're both homophobic.

TSTL, hooo boy. I haven't noticed anywhere near as much of this in m/m as in f/m buuuut it's still there.

Dumb villains. They don't make the characters look good, they make them look stupid as the heroes stumble around trying to figure out who the blindingly obvious villain is.

And because I've just come across both again...

Anything about kiss-swollen lips. So not. No. Especially not on a guy.

Jism which is described as tasting "salty sweet". No it doesn't. It tastes, in the best of cases, like soapy water warmed over because of it's alkaline basis. Among several taste-inducing amines it contains putrescine and cadaverine. Not exactly tasty per se already. In the worst case... with people described to be smoking, drinking beer and lots of alcohol, eating cabbage, etc.... Let's not even go there.

I wished that, at least for scenes supposed to be erotic, authors would abstain from trying to sell semen as the next best thing to icecream.

@Steelwhisper: LOL- "I wished that, at least for scenes supposed to be erotic, authors would abstain from trying to sell semen as the next best thing to icecream."
Thank you for the first belly-laugh of the day :-)

@Amaranth: Dito to the throbbing cock! Incredible what those beasts do all the time in romance novels! And big no to the Homophobic Bitch trope too.

@Tami: the problem with twitching and throbbing penes is that they really do that. There are few other (English) words to describe that activity ;) I'm not sure whether "quaking" or "shivering" would be so much better? ;)

Ah, no... shivering penis, not so good...
I see your point here :-)
Sometimes things/members/organs do things in real life, but in written words it just doesn't appeal to me...and I don't mind a "thobbing" here and there, but some MCs seem to have that throbbing feeling most of the time...for me it is more that it doesn't transport the sexual tension so well, if it all is down to a throbbing cock all the time...

Heh! Oh yes, only throbbing all the time isn't enough. And it happens anyway only at certain specific moments during sexual activity and not from start to finish, both the twitching and the throbbing :P

I think I find the twitching even worse than the throbbing, it just sounds so funny :-)

Check your GR PMs. I sent you a link to the twitching. It is NOT safe for work, which is why I didn't add it here. And we do need PMs.