What breaks your immersion in literature?

[Sleeping Umbran 308]

Have you ever read something, and just as you find yourself engrossed in the writing, something snaps you back to reality? Whether it be poor use of grammar, misspelled words or a character having the same name as you, I'm sure we've all experienced this at some point or another. So, I want to know, what's something that always break your immersion in literature?

For me, it's when an author describes the character feeling the cold of a blade plunging into flesh. As someone who has experienced this (by my own stupidity, I wasn't assaulted), I can personally confirm that this is not an accurate description of what it feels like to be stabbed. If anything, the wound gets really warm, or even hot as the blood rushes to the area, and the rest of your body feels cold.

 

[Sleeping Umbran 302]

I think the main thing that breaks my immersion in something is either bad voice acting (the laughing sceen from FFX still haunts me in my nightmares). Or when characters do something soooo stupid and incompetent that i just go WTF. One good example of that is literally whenever the characters in Wheel of Time go one gender hate rants, happens basically every chapter. I know its a mjaor aspect of the story, but its been like, what? 6 books into a 14 book serise and all the characters can do half the time is complain about the members of the opposite gender. I get it Nynaeve, boys are dumb and ur so smart. I get it Rand, you dont know why women find you attractive, and it confuses you. Just stop. World is ending, that shit is a little more important right now.
Another good example is in Warhammer 40k Lore, The Grey Knights, the Deamon hunting Space Marines who are paragons of purity and incorruptibility. Have to deal with a Deamon invasion, and to get more protection against the taint of Chaos. They decide, they decide to KILL a buch of Sister of Battle, basically Pure as all Heavan battle nuns, and bathe their armor in the Sister blood in order to kill the demons without getting corrupted. Yes this happened. Yes, no fan likes this happening. It was dumb. Like. Really fucking dumb. Granted, this was written by Matt Ward, who is the worst written Games Workshop had.

 

[Nevermind]

I'm always snapped back to reality whenever a character is described as "perfect" by an omniscient narrator. If a character calls another character perfect, that's one thing. Or if the perspective is third-person limited and so the narrator is describing one character as perfect because it's coming from the perspective of the main character, fine, but when a third-person perspective narrator, who by definition is supposed to remain relatively neutral, describes the character as such I always feels it comes off as lazy.

Perfect characters are boring, no one likes them, and describing a character as such shows that the author is inexperienced, at best.

 

[Corinthi]

I struggle when authors, particularly fantasy and roleplaying game authors, feel a need to create new words to describe common objects. I'm happy to broaden my vocabulary, but if I look up a created word in your glossary and find out it means 'Chair' or 'House', I'm going to be irritated that you felt the need to invent a new word instead of using one of the dozens of perfectly acceptable synonyms for those objects.

There are certain reknowned authors I can't bear reading because their need to create language for added exoticism is very obnoxious to me.

I'm happy to deal with new words for new concepts. You need to create language to descibe the unique metaphysics of your setting? Go for it. The cardinal directions aren't strange enough so you rename North South East West? Blech.

 

[humon]

For me the number one thing that pulls me out is internal inconsistency, or plot holes. If a character does something that doesn't make sense to me, and there are no hints that this oddness will be explained later... I'm out. If I get a whiff of decisions being made purely to enable some scene the author wanted to happen, or to rationalize the author's own weirdness... I'm out. As a general rule, characters can never be smarter than the author, so when I see characters acting like idiots, I can infer that the author is the same way.

 

[Sleeping Umbran 1949]

Well, I do feel irritated sometimes when I come across a grammatical error in a published book - like, didn't it get a thousand edits? But that's fairly rare.

What grinds my immersion to a halt is something usually to do with the story itself. To use the Wheel of Time example from Corinthi, one thing that frustrated me about those books is that it felt like literally the same story was being repeated over and over again - in the same generation of characters. And yes, also the constant harem- issues of Rand . So, repetition is one, for sure.

Another is when I realize that what the story I'm reading was advertised as, and what it actually is, are totally different. For example, someone picked me up a new fantasy novel from a local author once (I love supporting new local authors), and she (the author) told my friend it was a story of fantasy and magic, which is generally right up my alley. She never mentioned that it was a Christian story about a guy who becomes a messenger of God- it's extremely religious and while not bad, I was distracted the whole time by how irritated I was having expected one thing, and getting another. (I'm not really a fan of Christian literature anyway for reasons, although the supernatural elements of this story were interesting).

So that's me! I'm sure there are other things too haha!