The story you are reading suddenly gets bad.

Ok, lets face it. You have a nice little author making a story, so far so good, you like it. It has its ups and downs, that is to be expected sometimes, we are not perfect after all.
 
The latest chapters haven’t been too good, or maybe they are even better than before! Something is changing, but you don’t know why or what.
 
Oh my, what is the author doing? He got an idea from outside his story, and he is trying to add it into it?
 
Or maybe…oh my god, is the protagonist-slash-secondary character turning into a Stu? It must be your imagination, after all some characters deserve a lime in the daylight chapter. It freshens things up.
 
 
And….there you go, the author did something stupid, and the fanfiction is unbearable to read at this point. Now it only goes downhill. There are inconsistencies here and there, plot holes as far as the eye can see. The situation seems so forced you can feel it crawling up your ass and sitting on your lap.
 
So, do any of you have encountered these amateur authors that add unnecessary stuff into their stories, rendering them inferior or downright stupid from that point on? Why do you think it happens?
 
Here is my own list of situations i have encountered:
 
*Story goes well, suddenly feels forced. Then X character turns into a Stu.  
*Alicorn OC  
*Alicorn OC that is really the author’s personification.  
*Amnesiac random person/pony/animal/eldritch abomination ends in ponyville, instant love from everyone.  
*Character ends being a total unsympathetic or downright mega dense (Which for some reason happens to Rarity, most of the time).

This was what happened with that Winning Pony thing. It was a perfectly straightforward, reasonably enjoyable romantic comedy thing, and then out of nowhere the author decided to make it about war and that took over the entire story and went on forever. I have no idea why.

@Background Pony #5679  
I think that’s what made me leave Pony POV after a couple stories. Started out as a nice alt explanation thing for the S2 Premiere with after efects of Discord’s rampage. Then it goes into all this bullshit, like Fluttershy seeing how animals eat other animals makes her so deppressed that she turns into a reality bending monstrosity. And all these alt universe counterparts. And it’s still going.

@soundtea
 
You can thanks tumblr for making the whole alt universe counterparts crossover bullshit viable.

I’ll admit that I haven’t read enough fanfiction to have this happen to me. But as a fanfiction writer, I have been on the receiving end of this sort of reaction. It happened in a crossover story I’d written, where I’d incorporated video game elements into the story for no real reason, and inadvertently made one of the characters intensely unlikebale. After being thoroughly being dressed down by a reader that wasn’t very fond of the direction the story was going, I chose to remove these elements from the story, and heavily rework a number of troubled sections to correct the characterization problems.

@SocDev  
Oh no, this is separate from tumblr completely.

Normally I’m pretty forgiving, so it’s very rare for a story to be outright ruined for me by something. That being said, I do take notice when a story starts to lose its focus.
 
For instance, I was reading this one story where the focus was shipping Rarity and Twilight (there was a bit more to it, but I’ll leave it at that for simplicity’s sake). At first it focused on events leading up to Rarity/Twilight, but later it started introducing romantic subplots. First it was Spike/Pinkie, which made sense since Spike being brokenhearted over Rarity had been a plot point. But then it introduced an RD/Fluttershy/AJ triangle that had exactly nothing to do with the rest of the story. It wasn’t nearly enough to make me scream betrayal, but I was always a little weirded out by how out of place it was.
 
 
@Background Pony #5679  
I honestly didn’t have a problem with how Life and Times of a Winning Pony progressed. The changeling war arc was actually foreshadowed really well by a number of things (not the least of which was the story happening concurrently with season 2).

I was reading this nice little fanfiction about Kamina, from TTGL, coming to equestria after being resurrected by Celestia. Since she had to create a body for him out of nowhere she used her alicorn DNA, making him into an alicorn with growing powers, thanks to his spiral power.
 
Ok, not big deal. The character was handled nicely at the beginning, tho i noticed how pretty much everything orbited around him. Alright, still forgivable.
 
Then the author jumped the gun, decided that kamina and luna should have a kid…
 
And Nyx, from Past Sins, was added into the story.
 
I noped so hard.

@SocDev  
Being a huge TTGL fan, what I take away from that is that the author evidently missed the point of Kamina’s character. He’s not supposed to be an uber-powerful hero. He’s supposed to inspire the next generation so that they become uber-powerful heroes. If I put Kamina in Equestria, he’d be an earth pony.

@LanceOmikron
 
He began as a unicorn, alright, spiral power, drills, its ok.  
Then became the prince of equestria cuz he carries celestia’s blood… ok.  
Then he became twilight’s mate.  
Then he managed to get a herd.  
Then he altered the canon’s story by his mere presence.  
Then became an alicorn.
 
And now he has a foal with luna, named Nyx.
 
Also, Kamina was all about manliness, boasting to the point of looking like a lunatic, a lunatic that could push people to do what was the best for everyone.
 
In this story pretty much everyone… loves him, like that.

@SocDev  
Yeah, it doesn’t even matter if it’s Kamina, a canon pony, or an OC at that point. If any single character in a story does ALL of that, it’s bullshit. Period.

depends how you define bad.
 
but in most cases de-watch and thumbs down em.
 
the ones that are outright blasphemy… well I try and get rid of those.

@Shadow Star  
Like the fic went into a real bad direction.
 
Common one is nice and sweet shipfic suddenly getting a adventure or villain plot from out of nowhere.
 
Forgot to mention, the mood suddenly takes a 180 as a result.

@soundtea  

 
I admit, I don’t consider a fic going in a new direction to be a bad thing in and of itself. Sometimes it can be cool if it’s handled well. My litmus test for a new direction being questionable is when the fic, very suddenly, is no longer telling the story that the summary promised.
 
Like, there was this one story where Trixie turned out to be Twilight’s illegitimate half-sister. It was a good one-shot fic. Then it had a sequel that was going to be about Trixie meeting Shining Armor, and the three siblings would work out their new family situation. There’s a little of that, but then midway into the story, Twilight and Shining Armor are possessed by evil spirits that had corrupted King Sombra in the past, and they capture Cadance. Trixie barely escapes, and then has to save them all. It was actually decent, but it wasn’t the story that we were promised.

@LanceOmikron
 
I remember a story where Luna, Twilight and Spike were sent to another country to fix some political issues, the story had 8k per chapter and it reached like chapter 30 with…pretty much nothing happening.
 
To summarize: They reach that country, learn about the political and social ways in that country, meet the leaders, then get deeply involved with the whole religion/belief system there….and thats it. 30 entire chapters just for that.
 
Sometimes its not a matter of a story’s author adding unnecessary stuff, or not delivering what the summary says.
 
Sometimes the story just…never leads anywhere.

@LanceOmikron  
Kinda what I meant. The new plotline takes the established mood and flow and completely turns it on its head. Mostly for the worse.
 
Pony POV started out as an exploration into the psyches of characters during and after S1E2. Now it’s got all this dark universe stuff and all this reality fuckery. Something like this.

@SocDev  
Would you by chance be referring to the story “Under the Northern Lights?” I’ve not read it myself, but I do have a bit of familiarity with story’s general plot (thanks, TVTropes).

@Silent_Witness
 
Yep, thats the one.